Camp Muir, Panorama Point Snowshoe — Sunday, May. 26, 2024

Skinned up to Camp Muir with my son in mostly white out conditions with strong winds. 

This was the first weekend with required reservations, I had no problems getting one for 7am-9am when they released them at 7pm the night before. Website showed 189 available for that timeslot. We actually ended up arriving around 6:40am, so didn't end up using it.

Parking lot was already half full, with several parties getting ready to hike up. Most people skipped snowshoes, and after testing the snow right above the parking lot, we decided to as well. I was skinning up on a split board and my son was hiking up in his snowboard shoes (I carried the other board as well). 

Pretty solid boot path the whole way up Panorama face, only post-holed when we went off trail. I ended up putting on ski crampons once above the face but should have put them on earlier. My son put on crampons right above the bathroom, there's a couple of very steep faces where he was slipping in just boots.

The visibility was minimal, so GPS was mandatory, even for navigating up to Panorama Point. Make sure you bring at least 2 devices and don't forget a power bank. Despite all the cloud cover, I still got sun burned on the small part of my face that was usually facing the ground.

For clothes, I had hardshell pants and jacket above lightweight pants and sun hoody.  That blocked enough of the wind and snow that I felt toasty the whole way up. Most of the trip up was with lightweight gloves on, but the final quarter I put on some waterproof gloves (Showa Temres 282s are amazing) and my son put on some mittens.

Met quite a few parties coming down and several skiers. Most groups heading up turned around when the wind got worse but we kept going, mostly because we wanted to take refuge in the hut for lunch. The last 800 feet always feels hard, so we took it slow. 

Eventually we made it to the shelter. The ranger hut had several people walking around, but the big shelter looked abandoned until I opened the door and saw several faces looking out. There were several parties in there getting ready for a summit attempt the next morning, so we found an empty area, ate lunch, warmed up, and got ready to head back down. A short trip from the hut to the bathroom felt like being inside a blizzard, our jacket pockets ended up full of snow. We put on helmets, balaclavas, goggles, and warmer mid layers under our shells to handle that.

We carried our snowboards a little down the face where it was somewhat calmer and started skiing down. The snow was really good, but with the white out conditions, there was no fun to be had. There's nothing to fix your vision on with the blowing snow, water on the goggles, and barely visible snow below so I kept getting disoriented and crashing. We stopped and checked our location using GPS very frequently and tried to stay close to rocks as those gave me a frame of reference and we could then stay oriented. My son had an easier time since he could use me below to orient.

We had to take off our boards and boot across several rocky areas and once when we ended up too far off our trail, but we pretty quickly made our way back above panorama face. The snow here got sticker, but it was more fun since there were more landmarks and tracks to follow. Pretty soon we made it back to the snow above the parking lot which was packed with families and tourists and then to the car.

Total stats: 8.6 miles, 4600 feet, 5.5 hours up, 1.5 hour break at the hut, 1.5 hours back to the car.