At this time of the year I normally seek snow-free hikes. Unfortunately several good friends had planned a Mount Eisenhower hike for Sunday, and talked me into joining them.
We met at the Crawford path lot, and finding the Mount Clinton Road ungated drove two of the four cars to the Edmands Path trailhead.
The start was very pleasant, with dry trail, then patchy snow, then a very good solid snowpack. I put on my microspikes, my companions barebooted. I joked that the snow cover was so firm that it deserved the Good Housekeeping Seal.
At around 4,000 feet the trail stops going up and curves round the summit cone more or less on contour. This section was extremely unpleasant. A nasty sloping side hill all the way, with lots of snow getting us into the branches of the krummholz. The snow was soft enough to require snowshoes (which we carried) but the narrow spaces we had to push through made them undesirable. We were on the trail most of the time, though we did lose and refind it a few times. The section across the talus was snow covered, but reasonably flat. It took us a couple of hours to cover about a mile
By the time we reached the Mount Eisenhower loop the weather had warmed up considerably. Going up the loop we had a mix of snow, occasionally deep, and bare rocks. Not really snowshoe terrain. In the bare rock sections the trail was a stream from the melting snow.
We were obviously not going back the way we had come, so after a nice lunch we descended the other side of the Mount Eisenhower loop. I saw the two ladders there for the first time, they do help. Again, a mixture of snow and water running over bare rock.
More of the same on the Crawford Path towards Pierce. here we met the first really annoying blowdowns of the trip, there had been none of Edmands Path. Bushwhacking through krumholz is not fun Lots of water, and since it cannot drain through the rock there were many pools, some quite deep.
One of our group raced ahead of us to bag Pierce (the other three had no interest), and since I was tired and slow we split into two groups of two. My companion and I put on snowshoes, which we kept to a bit below the Mitzpah Cutoff. We had no problems with postholing in spite of the mid afternoon temps. A few blowdowns were easily bypassed.
The last mile or so was over mostly bare ground, with once again lots of water.
We met at the Crawford path lot, and finding the Mount Clinton Road ungated drove two of the four cars to the Edmands Path trailhead.
The start was very pleasant, with dry trail, then patchy snow, then a very good solid snowpack. I put on my microspikes, my companions barebooted. I joked that the snow cover was so firm that it deserved the Good Housekeeping Seal.
At around 4,000 feet the trail stops going up and curves round the summit cone more or less on contour. This section was extremely unpleasant. A nasty sloping side hill all the way, with lots of snow getting us into the branches of the krummholz. The snow was soft enough to require snowshoes (which we carried) but the narrow spaces we had to push through made them undesirable. We were on the trail most of the time, though we did lose and refind it a few times. The section across the talus was snow covered, but reasonably flat. It took us a couple of hours to cover about a mile
By the time we reached the Mount Eisenhower loop the weather had warmed up considerably. Going up the loop we had a mix of snow, occasionally deep, and bare rocks. Not really snowshoe terrain. In the bare rock sections the trail was a stream from the melting snow.
We were obviously not going back the way we had come, so after a nice lunch we descended the other side of the Mount Eisenhower loop. I saw the two ladders there for the first time, they do help. Again, a mixture of snow and water running over bare rock.
More of the same on the Crawford Path towards Pierce. here we met the first really annoying blowdowns of the trip, there had been none of Edmands Path. Bushwhacking through krumholz is not fun
Lots of water, and since it cannot drain through the rock there were many pools, some quite deep.One of our group raced ahead of us to bag Pierce (the other three had no interest), and since I was tired and slow we split into two groups of two. My companion and I put on snowshoes, which we kept to a bit below the Mitzpah Cutoff. We had no problems with postholing in spite of the mid afternoon temps. A few blowdowns were easily bypassed.
The last mile or so was over mostly bare ground, with once again lots of water.
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