Arrived at Longmire about 8:15am with things already starting to hum for an active day. The weather forecast predicted some precipitation that we anticipated being snow at the elevation of our intended destination - the saddle below Eagle Peak. Have always wanted to see it in snow, but the ascent up the avalanche chute to the saddle isn’t a good idea in winter, naturally.
Not knowing what conditions we might encounter, and wanting to give ourselves every chance of success, we hauled snowshoes, spikes, crampons, ice ax and helmets. As it turned out we only used the crampons, ice ax and helmet.
The trail was bare of snow until about 4500’ elevation. Then it was gradually snow with previous footsteps frozen in hard making walking awkward. We met two guys coming down who had not made it all the way to the saddle. We were happy to get to the open slope at 5000’ where one starts to have a view of sorts. Soon after we decided to put on traction devices and chose our crampons rather than our microspikes so that we wouldn’t need to change them out again for the final ascent up the chute.
About this altitude the light sprinkles turned to occasional snow which put a lovely new layer of white on everything. The snow up the chute was a mixture of wind crusted granular icy stuff and loose snow. I kicked in steps for my partner and up we went. The saddle was heavily corniced so no peaking over the edge. We sat and had lunch with no view at all, except for the marmot that came out of his house in the rocks of Eagle Peak. We hung out for about 30 minutes and headed down without incident. Saw a few casual hikers on our way down that were turning around when they hit the snow. The sun was shining when we arrived back at Longmire, perfectly matching our moods.
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