Over the past few years, I've already attempted to snowshoe up to Artist Point. However, I always found myself turning around right about the 1 mile mark due to inclement weather. I finally found a nice weekend to do an overnight up in Artist Point and it was so worth it.
The road up to the White Salmon and Heather Meadows ski area were both clear of snow. Any car can make it. I guess I've never had to park my car in the overnight lot when it was still ski season and I didn't know you have to reserve a parking spot. But I'm glad one of the people that I went on this trip with informed us. The parking permit was $32 and I picked the 'unoccupied vehicle'. I'm actually still not certain if this is required so if anyone has information on this, do let me know!
It was nice to finally be up in this area again when I'm not fogged in. The skies were clear even though there were a good amount of clouds. However, this was the best condition I have gotten amongst the past 3 times I've made it up here. The trail was easy to follow even though I was expecting more folks to be out on the trail on this fine Saturday. I still had an offline map downloaded as there were many tracks from previous snowshoers and could definitely cause a little confusion and sometimes these tracks led to nowhere.
The only hard section of the hike was a steady climb parallel to the ski area, clearly marked and after this, it was a relatively easy trek up to the parking lot, which was hard to identify with it being snow covered.
I saw folks that set up camp a little further down, just under the section with an obvious steep slope. They had a lot of tree coverage. But we decided that we wanted to get a better view and since the forecast called for minimal wind, we felt comfortable being in a slightly more exposed area.
We picked a spot with views of Shuksan, Baker, and Table Mountain and started digging. This was my first time snow camping in the winter. The last time I did was on the base of Baker when I was on the Railroad Grade trail. There was also already a snow barrier present so I used that as protection from the winds in case they do pick up later in the night but continued to dig a relatively shallow spot - just enough to house my tent for the night. My friend dug out a bench and table for us. The joys of snow camping. You create your own 'camp furniture'. It stayed relatively warm until the sun was starting to set.
We watched the sun set and turned in for the night. Although I kept checking the weather before heading out, I was still not expecting rain in the morning when I woke up. We quickly packed up and hiked back down to our cars. The conditions were bad and the rain actually stopped by the time we packed up but I thought it was still a good choice to pack up and head down.
I felt truly grateful to finally check this one off my list.
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