A friend and I drove up to take a look at Mount Ellinor. I hadn’t been up there this year and was curious about conditions. We didn’t plan on or bring gear for the summit.
The woods around Big Creek look like a tornado went through, with many downed and splintered trees, but the road and trail crews have done an amazing job clearing everything up. We started at the Big Creek campground; the trail was snow free to the bridge at the confluence, can’t speak to the condition of the loop trail after that. We headed up the Ellinor connector trail, surprised that there was absolutely no snow all the way to the lower trailhead. We detoured to the parking area there, which is still entirely snowed in. We talked to a couple of guys there who said the road is snow covered for about 1/2 mile before the TH, possibly also a berm blocking access. We continued up the snow free trail, until patches of hard snow started to appear just past the bench and big rock at about 3500 feet elevation. We donned micro spikes for the remainder, not strictly needed but definitely helpful. There was about an inch of powder snow on older hard packed snow, very pleasant walking.
Taking the winter route we got to the open area below the first big chute. Neither of us had looked at the avy report as we hadn’t planned on going for the summit, also no gaiters or ice axes, so we called it a day and had lunch. Probably a good call- the summit was in dense cloud, our lunch spot started getting darker and colder with some icy rain, so we beat feet. It looked like we had the mountain to ourselves, and the snow was great for walking, but… another day.
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