[abkoch3]

With good weather promised east of the pass, my friend and I headed up Saturday morning to celebrate my birthday properly by slogging up Arrowhead Mountain. With both of us nursing some nagging injuries, it promised to be an adventure in suffering, but he had some unfinished business with Arrowhead after a trip last year where the summit views included clouds and through those clouds some more clouds and beyond those some more clouds. We took a reasonably leisurely approach, arriving at the turnout on Hghwy 2 around 8:15 and were hiking by 8:30. We hiked a mile east along the train tracks before cutting right up towards the ridge. The snow at this point was well compact and crusty thanks to the warmer temps and rain causing plenty of melt and refreeze. Making our way up we kept a larger creek to our right until about 3700' where we crossed over and started cutting right to work our way towards the ridge. Snow got deeper and more powdery between 4000-4500' and from then until the ridge we were postholing to our knees with snowshoes on. As we gained the ridge around 5200' we started getting our first good looks east.

Our hopes of a nice quick traverse along the ridge were shattered pretty quickly. Wind loading from southerly winds had created a brutal series of drifts with deep troughs running perpendicular to the ridge. We resorted to a combination of weaving back and forth in the troughs with some occasional awkward scrambling up and over the drifts. It wasn't pretty and made for slow going, but we could see the summit so sucked it up. Wind scouring in the final approach to the summit made for easier walking and we hit the summit shortly around 12:00. Jim Hill was looking fine in the sun, the clouds were teasing over Daniel and the ridges to the south. We got a good look at Ingalls, a tease of Stuart (4th pic below), and some shifting views of others. The view north was pretty well clouded over as were the peaks of the Chiwaukums.

Hung around for a while up top, but I had to be back in Seattle by 4 for work, so we snowshoe skied and generally hustled back. A great, short gut check hike and we both bemoaned our less than ideal fitness that made for some suffering and slow going, but I still got to work JUST in time and all the happier for stealing a morning in the mountains.

[kitya]

Looks great and looks like you are quite fast to come back to seattle by 4 - that sounds very fit to me, Arrowhead is not Little Si