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Alpine Scramble - Hidden Lake Lookout & Peak

Surprised mostly a sunny and warm day, but the snow was too soft to make it to the top. Post-holing to knees or deeper as we went higher.

Jim Smith Jim Smith
May 29, 2022
  • Road suitable for all vehicles

  • Could not get to the trailhead as a pocket of 1.5 feet of snow on road.  Even after that melts out there are larges rocks blocking the road just before the TH parking area. Too large for people to move. 

Snow seemed firm enough at the TH and had not rained hard lately. But as we got up 1000+ ft from the TH we started to sink in more and more.  It got to the point that it took us 1 hour to go up .5 mile and by 145pm we were still another .5 mile and 800 ft to go up. Since it was warm we didn't want to  spend that much time and then have worst conditions coming down. 

We could kick off small top type slides if we gliasaded on the way down - like top 2 inches and those could go on slowly ..   Saw a little bigger amount of debris in the main valley and was happy that we chose to turn around and get down. 

We had brought our snow shoes to TH but thought that snow was firm enough to just go boots.  We should have brought them and we might have saved some time on the way up to make the summit. It would have still been hard with snowshoes as we were sinking to knee and thigh level as we went up.  

Students did a great job - taking turns kicking steps on sidehill and steep inclines. They also got to see a lot of different snow conditions.