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I wasn't planning on doing anything useful today except finishing up my taxes and maybe doing a little house cleaning but, well, I guess I got carried away. I nearly got seduced by the specter of "responsibility" and sat down in my office and went to work - horrors! - It was simply too nice a day to waste on such things. (It must have been the Starbucks tall, no-room black coffee that got me inspired!)
So, here I was, heading east on Washington's SR14 with no idea where go hiking. Too late to call any friends who might be in the same predicament so I decided to do Hardy Ridge. It's the first major trail system as you travel east on SR14 so at least I wouldn't feel too guilty about traveling too far and burning up some gas in a single passenger vehicle.
The snow level was only about 1,000 feet with some leftovers from the previous day and evening as low as 500 feet so with Hardy topping out at nearly 3,000 feet I knew I was going to be in for a snowshoe at the very least. OMG, did I run into serious snow, or what!
Here's a few pics of the trek:
At about 1,300' elevation, here's a view of the route:
By the time I got to the new section of trail, it was decidedly difficult:
If you didn't know this was the route, it would have been a little hard to pick out.
Here's the view a little further up the trail at the next switchback:
It quickly got worse:
The snow was over two feet deep by now and even with snowshoes, not so easy to negotiate.
Once on the ridge, here was my first view:
And this:
I decided to call it a day as by now the fresh snow was about 3 feet deep and hard to plow through, even with snowshoes. Besides, the drifts and cornices were daunting! (These big mounds aren't all snow - there are some rock ridges in this area.)
The temperature was down to 27 degrees and with a ten MPH wind that made the wind chill about 18 or so but I found it not particularly uncomfortable.
I decided to make a loop out of this and go back down via the trail on the east side of the ridge. I lost the trail in the deep snow and bent-over trees in only a few hundred feet so I just crashed downhill though the trees to the old road. Here's where I lost the trail:
All-in-all a very good day in the woods/snow - 7.2 miles and 1,980 vertical feet.
Don
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