Fantastic snowshoe trip up to Goat Peak today with ngie! We started from the Goat Creek trailhead off of the Bumping River Road across from Cougar Flats Campground. There is still a snow berm across the parking lot, but we were able to park completely off the Bumping Lake road. The first part of the trail was submerged under the melting snow, and the snow was super soft, so put on snowshoes for the first part. Once we got up about 100 vertical feet, most of the trail was snow free, so we stowed the snowshoes, and were able to hike up to 4400ft, before we ran into continuous snow, where we put snowshoes on, and I left them on all the way to the summit.
Up at 6000ft we ran into some super steep terrain. Ngie put on crampons and took out their ice axe for this part. I didn't have my ice axe with me or crampons, so I just went up the super steep slope with snowshoes. Up at 6230ft we got to the top of a sub peak, and had to do some scrambling, along with some tricky down scrambling to get to the saddle between Goat Peak, and this sub peak. After this, it was a steep snowshoe up to the summit. Some awesome views from the summit. The top of Mt Rainier was in the clouds along with Mount Aix, but we were able to see so many other peaks, along with Bumping Lake. It was a bit windy on the summit, so we didn't linger long.
Coming down the super steep slope was a bit tricky with snowshoes, but we made it down without slipping. We pretty much took our same route down, finishing at 6:10pm. Excellent trip!! 8.9 miles with 3707 ft elevation gain
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