Talk about an exciting trip to Peggy's Pond and Mt Daniel! Every single time we've tried to summit Mt Daniel, we've been racing against incoming storms. This time we gave ourselves a couple days to finish the job, which was definitely needed.
Going to Peggy's Pond, the weather forecast called for a 30% chance of a thunderstorm but no accumulation was expected. Apparently that forecast changed. A couple hours after we got to camp, dark clouds rolled in quick and unleashed a crazy hail and rain storm. We easily had a few inches of hail followed by a couple inches of rain. Enough to cause a few washouts along the traverse from the PCT to Peggy's Pond, and you could see parts of the mountain above Circle Lake washed out as well. You can see the craziness of the storm in our video https://youtu.be/CnP_grz4Im0
The next day we were back to clear skies, just with a little bit of smoke lingering in the air. Some mini fires started nearby but sounds like those were put out pretty quickly.
We made our way to Mt Daniel, and my map had the East Peak labeled as the summit. We were very disappointed to find out that we were on the wrong summit after we were already standing on the East Peak.
So we backtracked and found the real trail and made our way over to the true summit, which is definitely much cooler. Pea Soup looked amazing in the sunlight, and the rock features are really neat there.
There was also a great water source below one of the snowfields that we filled up at near the summit. The water was so cold and delicious. It was worth the 100' of elevation loss to get to it.
Overall the trip was amazing and I'm glad we finally knocked Mt Daniel off the list!
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