Winter Scramble - Satulick Mountain

At our Renton meeting place, we contemplated cancelling the trip, but we decided that a long drive in the pre-dawn monsoon sounded like the ideal way to spend a Sunday morning, so we headed to Longmire anyway. We are glad we did, because the weather cleared up. 

Just like in boxing, where a quick left jab followed by a hard right leads to success, when reaching the junction of the Wonderland Trail and the Rampart Ridge trail, taking a quick left followed by a hard right leads to the summit. Getting them confused and taking a quick right... leads... well, let's just say we enjoyed the extra exercise.

The crossing of Kautz creek was surprisingly easy (as the flow was unusually light for this time of year), but the crossing of Pyramid Creek was challenging.  Having surmounted  that, everything else was straightforward and easy. The snow slowly got deeper as we climbed, reaching about 6 inches by the time we got to the Devil's Playground and left  the trail. It quickly deepened after that and reached about 2-3 feet of depth at the summit.