Some photos from exploring Cloud Cap and Tilly Jane on Sunday.
Sunday night was HOT on the mountain, even at 6000 feet. This lead to us sleeping pretty poorly, but I think I got 4 hours straight at the end.
We woke up around 6AM, broke down camp, ate a quick breakfast and we were on the trail up at 6:45.
I misinterpreted the signage on the way up and we initially took the old Timberline trail straight up that lead to East side of the Eliot canyon and we hiked up the little ridge there, which was fine, but slow going. We eventually saw the correct trail down beneath us 100 feet and hiked down and continued our way up. We had great blue skies as we made our way up to the Cooper Spur Shelter.
We stopped, had a snack, and then continued on the Cooper Spur trail. We admired the massive boulders on the lower part of the trail and took opportunities on the switchbacks to check out the amazing Eliot Glacier.
Eventually, when we got onto the main slope of the spur, we hit a snowfield covering the trail.
I checked the elevation and we were at about 8100ft at this point. If we didn't have the dog, we may have gone across, but we weren't going to take that risk with her. We hiked back down close to the last switchback looking for an alternative way up. It became apparent that many people were just scrambling the stone/scree field. We didn't want to do this with the dog, but my wife was kind enough to wait while I hiked up. It only took about 10 minutes of fast hiking to get to the Japanese Hikers stone and the last of climber's camp stone breaks.
I was back down to my wife and pooch in another 10 minutes and from there, we started heading down. We had only seen one person all day so far, and he was heading down to Cloud Cap around 7AM, but we saw a number of people checking out the Cooper Spur Shelter as we came down. The trail was rocky and did a number on our dog's paws, so we took a few breaks for her to rest before fully getting off the mountain. We had blue skies the whole time and in general had a great day. We decided to go home via Govt Camp and stopped at Cobra Dogs on the way, highly recommended after a morning of hiking!
