Headed up to Lake Colchuck Saturday and had to hike the road up to the Stewart Lake/Lake Colchuck trailhead as the FS had the gate closed right off of Icicle Creek Rd. The road was completely snow free but the trail was 95% covered in compact snow/ice even on our way down on Monday. There were a few creek crossings that either had very rotten snow bridges about to collapse or that had already collapsed and required rock stepping across.
I slipped on the big bridge near the horse ford cut-off and dropped one of my hiking poles in the creek :(... if anyone finds a green/silver NPS centennial anniversary edition pole I'd be extremely grateful to see it again.
Once over the bridge just pass the Lake Stuart junction stick to the right along the creek and don't try to go up the snow-covered boulder field. A number of boot paths are misleading as they head up that way.
Sunday we headed up Aasgard Pass and because Dragontail looked sketchy, big cornices and it was wreathed in clouds, we decided to head up the lower and much less steep Enchantment Peak. Technically we didn't summit because we only climbed to the westernmost high point and I think the easternmost high point would be considered the summit but we still got some decent views for only having to climb 400 ft or so higher than Aasgard.
The glissade trip down was far more than I had bargained for. There were a few inches of snow on top of an icy layer and controlling our speed took a lot of effort. We made a poor decision to continue our glissade over an area that looked untouched and rather steep and when I headed down I picked up speed and somehow ended up tumbling. Thankfully I was able to recover after about 300 feet of uncontrolled descent and ended up only getting the wind knocked out of me, losing my sunglasses and straining something in my shoulder. I ended up putting crampons back on and down stepping about 1000 feet or so before I worked up the nerve to try glissading and finally getting to the bottom.
Monday we packed up early and headed out. Because of the icy trail conditions I ended up wearing crampons nearly all the way back to the Lake Colchuck trailhead. Because Monday was the start of the permit season they had opened the FS gate and I was able to hitch a ride for part of the way down the road to finish off a great weekend in the Enchantments, barring the glissading mishap.
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