Snow Lake Trail

18 February 2011

(Photo, above) George snowshoeing on the lower part of the Snow Lake Trail on a few inches of new snow over four feet of base. The temperature was low enough that we were able to wear fleece jackets all the way up the valley to the headwall above Source Lake. In the photo above George is crossing a gentle snow slope. It wasn't until later...

that the slopes that the trail crossed were steeper. In some cases it was clear that there was some danger of minor surface snow slides although the avalanche danger was forecast to be only moderate.

This is C.J. (above) crossing steeper snow slopes and slides near the valley headwall. There was not much of a snowfield above us so we felt fairly safe just spreading out so we could cross the slope one at a time.

The sky was a deep blue above the peaks on the Denny Mountain-Bryant Peak ridge although later the clouds shaded the sun .

Instead of continuing up the steep headwall on a route that was not obvious, we stopped for lunch on an open slope protected by trees above us.

In addition to the stunning scenery, we had a group of young boarders below us who had fashioned a couple of jumps and were convincing each other to go first. When a skier took this jump (shown above in a telephoto view) we were astounded that he didn't just sail over the jump but did a complete backflip (or whatever the current term is).

Oh, yeah, it was a good trip!

We left from Alpental lower parking lot and were able to walk most of the way on a trail that had been packed hard before the most recent few inches of snow. There were a few tracks but they must have been from the previous day because we met no one else on the trail until we were almost back to the trailhead.

It was just as well that we didn't need snowshoes until we reached the headwall above Source Lake because we had to cross two streams both of which required climbing down into a gully and then back up the other side. The snowshoes and attached crampons were definitely useful as we started to cross snowslides although before the next trip I'll have to try something to keep snow from building up in the crampons.

There were a fair number of folks on skis, boards and snowshoes who had come up the bottom of the valley directly from Alpental (or, in the case of some skiers, had traversed high so they could ski down the couloirs below The Tooth, Bryant and Chair Peak). If we had continued on somewhat farther, we probably would have run into snowshoe tracks leading to the pass over to Snow Lake.