We headed up towards Silver Peak, turning west shortly before a small subsidiary bump on the Abiel ridge. Apparently we should have hugged this "bump" a little more closely, as we ended up traversing along the south side of the ridge, well below the crest. The going wasn't half bad, though, and kind of fun - forging our own way rather than following the boot tread of thousands of climbers. As we got closer to Abiel we climbed up towards the ridge, eventually intersecting with a well defined boot tread that was to take us to the summit. The trail was fun, with a few little rock steps thrown in here and there to provide a little variety. We arrived on the summit close to lunch time, and sat on some comfortable rocks enjoying the panoramic view - Humpback stretching out to Granite, all the peaks in the Snoqualmie Pass area, most of Commonwealth Basin and most of the Gold Creek Basin as well. It goes without saying that Silver and Tinkham Peaks were quite prominent.
It was early enough in the day that we decided a two summit day would be fun - I had taken Maren up Tinkham Peak several years ago, and we thought it would be fun to do again, and compare what she thought of it now that we've been doing some real climbing for several years.
We scrambled on down from Abiel, this time following the boot path all the way back to the Silver-Tinkham Saddle, then headed south along the north ridge of Tinkham. As the path works it's way upslope it frequently branches off in several directions - no worries, though - they all are working towards the same location. 15 minutes from the saddle we came out of the trees at the base of the Tinkham summit rocks.
As we were climbing down, we briefly discussed running up Silver Peak, but decided we'd rather use the time to pick huckleberries on the way out. Silver, Abiel and Tinkham would, however, make for quite a doable triple summit day - I'll save that for another time!