FS4330 opened to wheeled vehicles last week, so I jumped on the opportunity to experience winter again... the Daniel Snow Machine never fails to provide bottomless snow!
Road conditions: You could drive any high clearance 4x4 to within 5 miles of the trailhead (the junction with 4W301 which it appears most people drive up, although it is closed until June 15). Past there, the road appears to have not been groomed this year so the snow becomes much more difficult to drive and peaks at several feet of depth. Realize it's a lot harder to get out at 5pm when it's all wet and soft then at 8am to get in. In addition to the snow, unfortunately there is a mud-pit about 2.5 miles from the trailhead that most vehicles would probably be unable to get through... as far as I know, this happened on November 29th when I happened to head up the road at midnight and came up on the tail-end of a day long stuck-vehicle-recovery in this spot.
The mud pit, good luck...
First wheeled vehicle of 2015 in the parking lot!
Trailhead
Started up the trail, the first little bit before getting out of the basin is old icy crusted snow with frequent painful postholes.
Then, there is almost no snow on the trail all the way up to the ridge, at which point you enter winter and there is many feet of snow
Made it to Squaw Lake pretty quickly with the good trail conditions.
Then the snow really picks up, just above Squaw Lake it probably gets up to 5-6 feet of snow.
About a quarter of the way to Cathedral Rock the snow deepens yet more, and now there is deep soft snow. That terrible condition where 90% of the time you step down, the ice breaks, and you fall to your knee... and 10% of the time it holds you.
I couldn't even estimate snow depth up here because there is enough to fill in even big tree wells... but it is safe to say that there is a ton of snow.
Cathedral Rock
Pushed on to the junction of the PCT and Peggy's Pond trail. Averaged about 0.5MPH up here on the ridge, of course neglected to bring snowshoes since I didn't think there would really be much of any snow.
This is about where I turned around, continues around onto the Peggy's Pond trail.
The plan was Peggy's Pond, but since it was snowing steadily at this point with bottomless soft snow and a fully loaded Cathedral Rock, it seemed foolish to do the Peggy's Pond trail.
Turned around and it snowed the whole way back to Squaw Lake, then wet-snowed back to the trailhead
A rare sighting of beautiful cold dry fluffy snowfall in 2015!
Learning mountaineering: 10% technical knowledge, 90% learning how to eat
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Learning mountaineering: 10% technical knowledge, 90% learning how to eat
"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
— Abraham Lincoln
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"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
— Abraham Lincoln
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Thanks for bringing back some conditions.