Carter Dome, 29 Dec

[vegematic]

We arrived to a fairly full 19-mile Brook trailhead about 8:45 this morning and waited for some others to arrive. By 9:00 they still hadn't shown so we hit the trail. We quickly warmed up making pretty good time (for us) over the largely bare trail. The 19-Mile Brook trail up to the Carte Dome trail ranged from snowless to lightly coated (less than an inch or two). Plenty of sneaky patches of ice hiding under what snow there was and the two sidehills early in the hike were tricky to negotiate with bare boots. Just before the Carter Dome trail we put on yak trax and kept them on for the remainder of the trip. While we were putting on the trax we were joined by someone else who had been waiting for the same group we had been waiting for.

The CD trail was similar to what we'd been hiking only with slightly more snow, increasing to about 3-4 inches at Zeta Pass and about 6-8 inches at the summit. As we were climbing up to Zeta Pass the rest of our group caught up with us. We got up to Zeta Pass at around 12:15, had some snack, and headed up to the summit which we reached by 1:30. It was pretty cold and breezy and we didn't hang around much longer than necessary for a snack and a few pictures. The views we got were gorgeous under bluebird skies. The trip down was uneventful until we reached the first sidehill on the 19-Mile Brook trail where one of our group took a nasty slip and banged his knee badly. He was able to slowly make it back to the car under his own power. We got back to the car park at about 5:30 and found almost no other vehicles other than our own. Must be a pretty quiet night at the Hut.

Conditions in a nutshell:
The trails were easily negotiated without snowshoes but most folks used some sort of traction aid, mostly yaktrax and stabilicer but we saw a few folks with crampons which were overkill. I saw that a few folks bare-booted much or all of the trip. The Carter Dome trail had several nuisance blowdowns. I was able to duck under most of them pretty easily but taller folks had a tougher time of it.
-vegematic

 

[Jazzbo]

Additional Trail Conditions

Thanks for the TR. I'd only add few details. This was my first outing this season where I encountered anything close to winter conditions i.e. my water bottle froze up. So folks coming up from the south better remember to insulate their water bottles. 19 Mile Brook had some icy spots, but Carter Dome Trail to Zeta Pass was very good ... no ice to speak of and only few blowdowns. We took the side hill trail from Zeta Pass to sag between Carter Dome and Mt Hight to avoid the steep route directly up Mt Hight. The sidehill trail had good footing with packed snow with no ice to speak of, but had at least 8 blowdowns of large diameter spruce, not enough to slow us down too much, but some required getting down on knees etc. We encountered a party of four 20-something guys who did the loop down to Carter Hut. We saw them back at the trailhead at end of day. They made it down the steep trail down to Carter Notch without incident although it did take them long time to descend with much butt sliding. They had also taken steep route over Mt Hight. They had crampons and some ice axes.

Here's link to the pics I took.

Carter Dome Hiking Pics