My buddy and I wanted to go do a fun weekend trip and I was getting tired of the Gorge so we decided to try one last snowshoe trip for the year. We settled on Crater Lake with the intent of summiting Mt. Scott. I called ahead to the park and they said that snow conditions were very poor for snowshoeing, but we were determined so we went anyway. The trip from park headquarters to the base of Mt. Scott is 12.5 miles and then it's another 2.5 miles or so to the top of Scott. As the entire route before the Scott part was going to be on the road, I completely underestimated how strenuous the trip would be to fit into a weekend.
We started from park headquarters at a little after noon on Saturday and were immediately on snow. The weather was overcast with some occasional light showers, but nothing too bad. I realized on the way down that we were fortunate that the sun wasn't out much on Saturday because that would have made the snow even worse. It was fairly sloppy and suncupped so it made the going a lot more tiresome than I had imagined.
Typical stretch of road...
View along the way...
Mt. Scott...
It took us about five hours to cover the 12.5 miles to Scott and that is where the real adventure began.
We were hoping that the trail would be uncovered on part of the mountain so it would be easy to get up, but we weren't that lucky. The snow by then was very soft and steep and it was very tedious trying to get up. I do have to say that I absolutely love my MSR Denali Ascent EVO snowshoes...they worked like crampons and it would have been impossible to get up (and then down) without them. As there wasn't a route to follow, we made the best line we could find up and around the mountain and, after about two hours, we finally arrived on top. We decided to make camp there and did so in a small, windsheltered spot just a few feet from the lookout station.
The night was very cold and very, very windy. We were fortunate that the weather cleared up in the evening and the sunset was beautiful. We made dinner and went to bed, but sleep was a little difficult with the way the wind was whipping all around.
The morning was again beautiful and we got going early so we could get home to our families at a decent hour. The views extended for a long way in all directions and we could clearly see the Three Sister and thier nearby peaks, Mt. McLoughlin, Mt. Thielsen and Mt. Shasta. Of course, the lake was gorgeous.
Getting down Scott was a challenge as the soft and sloppy snow from the evening before had turned to solid ice. There was a lot of dry ground up high with a few ice patches so we went without snowshoes until the lower sections. I slipped and fell on the ice when my trekking pole folded in half and slid down about 25-30' before catching myself on a tree. I scraped up my arm pretty good and took a large chunk of skin out of my thumb (very painful). The trekking pole ended up in two pieces (Leki Ultralight; this is my second broken pair so I'm taking them back to REI to get something else as I don't trust these now). We got down to some steep snow slopes in the forested lower sections and I was a bit nervous about how we were going to get down without crampons. We tried the snowshoes and they stuck like champs and getting down the 30-40 degree slopes turned out to be much easier than we expected. This could not have been done with the classic (Atlas-style) snowshoes.
More views from along the way...
The slog back to the car was long and very tiring. The snow had firmed up overnight, which made the long stretches of suncupped snow quite exhausting. The snow was firm enough that once we got back on the road I went for most of the way down without snowshoes. This was mostly to take advantage of the dry pavement that made an occasional appearance. I would guess that the road was about 80% covered with snow, but that 20% of pavement was always great to see.
We made it down to the car by a little after noon on Sunday after having covered a lot of ground. I was happy to be sitting. The North Entrance of the park opened on Friday (which I didn't find out until we got there Saturday morning as the park website said it was still closed) so that cut over an hour off the drive home to Hillsboro.
Views from the car...
Mt. Scott...
The trip was strenuous but wonderful and I'm looking forward to going back next year (earlier in the season) to snowshoe the entire rim. I don't expect that the road will be open for at least another month. The road is still 80% covered in snow and there are many places where it's still more than 10' deep. There is also a lot of large rockfall covering the road that will take some time to clear out once the snow does melt. We only saw two other people (day hikers/snowshoers) and that was on the way out about a mile from park headquarters. The ranger who gave us our backcountry permits said he hadn't given out almost any of those in quite a while and was surprised that we were trying to do Mt. Scott as a weekend trip.
Total mileage was about 30 with an estimated elevation gain/loss of about 4000' (this includes a lot of ups and downs and route-finding corrections on Scott).
