Mount Rose — Saturday, May. 13, 2023

After deciding to bail on a Mt. Ellinor climb plan due to the heat wave, we let ourselves sleep in and set up Mt. Rose around 9:45 AM. Trail is lovely up through the start of the lollipop loop/ Horse Camp — snow is melted out through there. Shortly after we took the left / clockwise rotation though the fun started. On the left side there was quickly a sketchy creek crossing where snow bridges are melting fast. I think I also went in one other hole. It was maybe noon ish at this point. But aside from that, left side was actually pretty ok. The real problems were on the climbers’ right looking up, which we took going down to complete the loop. The trail becomes very difficult to follow as many fewer people seem to have gone that way, and the postholing / tree well / sketchy snow bridge situation was rampant around 1PM. At one point I was in a tree well to my chest. Lost count of how many times I scraped my bare legs on snow going into holes. It was brutal. Eventually we did find trail markers again and get out of the snow shortly before rejoining the other side of the loop, but I’ll be honest that I was getting a bit worried about us for a minute there. All told, our round trip was an outrageous 7 hours due to all the hole falls and routefinding.

Don’t be stupid like me. 1. Start early, for real, and 2. Take the shorter side of the loop both directions.

I’m sure much more will be melted out soon and this will all be moot, but for the next few days it’s gonna be a minefield for other lazy people like us who hit the top at midday.