grouseking
Well-known member
It all started with a dizzy feeling late Friday night. I've been battling a sinus infection since oh, about early December, and even though I'm mostly better, this past week the symptoms came back. So I prob shouldn't have hiked, at least up that trail.
But I ignored it because I was a) heading to the whites Saturday, and b) was going to do a silly, thing, and break the 4+mile Skookumchuck trail after 1-2 feet of snow fell! Fun? Maybe for some....I guess I wanted to see if it was fun for me too.
I thought it would be possible to make it quite far, if not all the way to treeline, considering I had 3 other strong hikers with me. Boy, was I mistaken.
I was elated that at the beginning of the trail, it had already been broken out. This brought my hopes way up, on the possibility that someone had made it all the way up. So after packing up, I set out ahead of the others to check out the conditions, but not before I took a shot of Cannon mt from the trailhead.
About 10 min in, they caught up to me, and I realized I had forgotten my food. Right then I heard the "Skoo" chuckle a little. Thankfully, mattl had this entire loaf of banana bread with him, so he gave it to me, and off we went. So then, I laughed back. Never a good idea to laugh at nature...
The trail was beautiful...I hope to get back up here to check it out during the summer.
And then Skoo began to chuckle louder. The person who broke the trail before us, must have said "screw it" because they turned around right around where I took the pic below. So it was time to break trail.
I've broken thru about a foot of snow before, up a mountain, and I did fairly well with that, but yesterday the trail breaking was not my friend. Prob cause I was feeling sick, and prob cause there was up to 2 feet of new fluff to break thru. But I thought, maybe...we could make it since we had a group of 4. So off we went, trudging up and down, thru some of the most gorgeous winter hardwoods I have yet to see in the whites.
Wait, where is he going??? haha
I had seen 4 or 5 blazes up to this point, and they were all at the beginning. Now, we reached a point where we all stopped dead in our tracks, because we were not sure where the trail went. Did it continue to follow Skookumchuck Brook? Or was this where it went up the hill to the left? There was a steep sidehill, that appeared to be a buried stream, but it did not look like a trail that much. Straight along the brook, the normal trail corridor became super narrow, and we suddenly we hiking over buried hobblebushes. This is where the Skookumchuckle became a louder laugh. Mattl and I are usually quite good at following trails, but there was just so much snow, it made it next to impossible to find where we were going.
This is where our snowshoe paths started to go all over the place, searching for the path. I sincerely apologize if anyone follows any of these paths, so if you attempt to hike up there, be very careful. Well, we found a couple of animal paths, but they were def not the human trail, and after a couple super steep areas, and about 3 or 4 spruce traps, I decided I wasn't having fun anymore. We turned around shortly therafter. Still, bushwhacking thru the woods with deep snow is almost magical.
Before Matt fell into a spruce trap
Justin forcing a smile
cont in a min
