After our April 9 attempt, we had to try again. We took a small group of Mountaineers on what we billed as an intermediate snowshoe, but probably should have been designated a winter scramble.
We took our previous descent route up - the steep old snowmobile track - now with snow bridges and undercut snow. We used snowshoes about 200ft up from the cutoff and never busted out crampons or microspikes. We used ice axes in places - one side hill traverse and the fin to the summit, but mostly poles.
Once we did the first 1500ft on the snowmobile track, we crossed the road and continued straight and a bit to the right up over a domed hill/burn area to reach a ridge and another old roadbed at 5200ft.
Turning left, we followed that old roadbed on the ridge, where we'd stopped last time due to cornices and an avalanche slope.
Eventually we cut across to climbers' right to reach yet another ridge (yay!) at about 5400ft.
That ridgeline was heavily corniced with big falls, so we cut across - again to climbers' right, up and around and then down and then up onto the final (mercifully flat) ridgeline at 6000ft toward the mountain.
We followed some fresh snowmobile tracks (we could hear the snowmobiles, but never saw them) up to the summit block and then hiked up a freaky-looking but pretty chill fin to the top, where we interrupted a serious lady bug orgy (a million ladybugs mating) in the rock berm on the summit.
The snow was slippery on the way down. We were able to glissade a couple hundred feet. Those who took off their snowshoes had a few waist-deep postholes.
Totals were 10.2mi and 4435ft of gain, but on snowshoes off trail, this proved much harder than we'd expected. It took about 9hrs. We only saw 2 other humans all day, a car camping couple at the TH when we started out.
Comments