Today we go up Mount Baden Powell. It’s a 4 mile steep uphill. Because of the snow, the trail is not visible and there’s many places we just go straight up the mountain. Looking back, I see beautiful views of the valleys we are ascending from.
This hike is supposed to be a spring summer hike. We should experience snow in the Sierras sometimes a couple days at a time but often with dry trail between snow. This year with the unprecedented snow fall much of the hike is not even winter hiking, it’s actual mountaineering. That is what we are doing today. We are going straight up the side of the mountain on steps kicked into the snow.
Just below the summit of Baden Powell you can see the valleys leading up to it in the clouds that we are above.
I head along a ridge line towards the top of Mount Baden Powell, following a boot track up to the top.
Made it to the summit cold and windy, but the views are spectacular as seen in this 360° video.
It is a long slog through snow along the ridge lines, continuing across the mountain range.
This picture is really cool. It shows the clouds coming up one side of the valley when they reach the saddle they hit the inversion from the opposite side and they’re pushed back on themself not crossing the saddle.
A couple miles after reaching the summit of Baden Powell I found the trail to be unsafe to continue. It was side hill, the snow is slushy with ice underneath, I tried about a quarter mile and turned back. Most of the recent comments on the hiker app indicated a lot of people had not continued. I linked up with four other hikers, Boomerang, Shortcut, Christina and, Conner.
We discussed two alternate routes and picked one that lead down to the highway. It would result in a 6 mile road walk after a 2+ mile cross country trek.
We did have some opportunities for some glissading, which was very fun.
We got down to the highway and needed to do a 6 mile road walk it sucked! Snow was over a good portion of it; as well as big boulders and rocks you had to walk around. We ended up in a another roadside trail head parking lot with a bank of fog around us.
Again, there were many hikers here. I pitched my tent right next to the picnic table in this bare spot.
Today’s miles 12.1 (with the road walk we did 14.2) Total trail miles 565.3
(PCT mile mark 374.0 due to Flip completion of 200.7 and fire)
