Hough via Lillian Brook, March 6, Gary's W5

[BlackSpruce]

Gary and I shattered a trail to the summit of Hough. It was fast and easy to the beginning of the herdpath, then not so bad to near the "fork" and then extremely difficult after that. As it's very close to the herdpath we travelled a few hundred yards up the Pough slide before heading towards the Hough-Pough col again. Views from the small slide one the best in the mountains! The last .25-mile from col to summit took 75 minutes, lots of ice on the trees and above the snow. The crust is thick but breaks every step, so it was one step and 2 down all the way up, we made a bee line for the ridge about 400 linear feet from true summit. Coming down was much faster but not that great due to the ice chunks and the path breaking down some more. Every time we tried to move faster we would go head firts intoa tree or the snow.

All in all the bushwhack part took us 8 hours for a 12 hours day total... no speed demons that's for sure, still we were totally exhausted after hitting our way up Hough. Gary completed his fifth winter round on the summit! Coming down and out we were in the sun all the way the lean-to.

Trail should get some traffic on Friday as going out we met two campers planning to follow our tracks.