Spark Plug and Little Spark Plug Peaks, Surprise Lake Snowshoe — Friday, Jan. 17, 2025

Fantastic snowshoe adventure with Ngie, as we got up to the summit of Little Spark Plug Peak via the Surprise Lake trail. Beautiful day, but a little brisk out, as it was in the upper 20’s when got started at 10:08am. Road to the parking area was bare in spots with a little compact snow and ice.

Trail has a nice compact snow boot path up to some open slopes around three miles in. Micro spikes were nice to have for this section. After this I started to post hole a bit, so I decided to put on snowshoes. Ngie followed suit, and we used them all the way and down from the summit from this point. Snow was mostly consolidated today, which made the snowshoeing much more pleasant! The trail was hard to follow at times, so we went straight up the slope toward the lake,arriving at the far north end of Surprise Lake to the right of the outflow. 

When we got to the lake, we saw the two other snowshoers that had started earlier than us. These were the only people we saw all day. From Surprise Lake we went straight up the ridge following some old ski tracks, before veering to the right to get around this very jagged vertical face ridge. There was one tricky spot where we had to traverse a very steep open slope below some vertical faces. Would not want to do this trip on a high avalanche day. We were actually going to do this trip this past Sunday, but decided against it due to considerable avalanche conditions that day, and did Peak 5484 instead. It’s a good thing, as we crossed some old avalanches on this traverse.

Once we wrapped around this section we headed up and crossed the frozen Little Plug Lake. After crossing the lake we went up another steep slope up to Spark Plug Lake. Here we took a break, before heading up the ridge towards the peak. Just before the summit we ran into a gendarme, so we had to drop down to the west, and then head steeply up to a notch, and then up to the summit. Some fantastic views from the summit. The summit area is pretty small, with a cornice forming on the east side. Be aware of this, as it’s a vertical face down on this side.

We pretty much followed our tracks down, deviating a few times once down past Surprise Lake. We donned our headlamps once got down lower, as we finished at 6:23pm.

Awesome trip!! 10.3 miles with 4179 ft gain

More Information on this Trip Report

• https://caltopo.com/m/J51MRRA