I love coming up to this lookout either very early or very late season, and managed to convince a fellow Type II fun friend to snowshoe up. Starting conditions were WAY better than we’d been expecting: didn’t hit first snow until 3000’, and it only became significant at about 3500’. Someone had recently broken trail, and we didn’t put on snowshoes until just before the sketchy south facing avy slope at about 4500’. There were a bunch of releases of varying age, so we made the call to do the winter reroute on the ridge line. That was…. Arduous. Lots of loose, powdery snow. Took us 3.5 more hours to the lookout from the point where we rerouted. All told, as two people who are pretty quick and enjoy sufferfests, it took us 8 hours snowshoe up (took 4 to get back down).
Lookout was in great shape, we had to chip ice off the storm door to get it open (and as someone had written in the 11/12 entry in the logbook, they’d had to break the lock on the toolbox outside to get a pry bar and get the ice off— hope that person got in touch with the caretakers to make that right!). The thermometer in the lookout is full of lies: I was last up in late May and it was hovering statically around 30, which I could have maybe believed. But it was definitely down into the teens last night (see pic) and the thermometer still claimed a hair under 30.
On the hike back down, enough new snow had fallen to largely obscure our tracks, so even though we broke trail for whoever next heads up— it’ll likely be gone shortly. We probably hit the last semi-reasonable conditions for the season, expect a very snowy slog if you attempt past this point.
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