We attempted the Keyhole route yesterday with a 3:45am start, which was about an hour later than we had hoped. The icy roads and snow on the way the whole way up to the trailhead slowed us down even more. My car said the temperature was 5 degrees out when we started. The trail to start with was easy to find and was mostly boot packed except for the new snow of about 3 o 4 inches. As we approached tree line snowshoes were definitely needed. With the new snow the trail immediately disappeared so it was really helpful to have the GPS. From there we experienced steady winds around 10mph with intermediate gusts from 30 to 40mph that seemed to come out of nowhere. It snowed almost constantly from start to finish although it was almost all very light.
As we followed the trail there were a few sections where there was some serious trail breaking with snow up to our waist even with snowshoes. About a mile below the boulder field almost everything was windblown at that point so we took off our snowshoes and ditched them below the boulder field. Winds were HOWLING through the keyhole. It had taken us about 6 hours just to get that far so we figured we would try to go past the Keyhole about a hundred yards to see if the winds died down. . We got to just below the trough when we noticed slabs of snow starting to slide as we tried to traverse them. We sank into our waist on a few of these sections and noticed how easily the snow broke away and slid down the mountain. Looking up we saw that the slopes looked very unstable and anywhere from 35 to 45 degrees. We also figured with that with the conditions at our pace it would take us probably another 4 hours to summit from where we were and with the conditions we being what they were we decided to call it a day. I am no avalanche expert but what we saw just before the trough was pretty frightening. I would not recommend this route until the avalanche danger decreases. Also do not follow our "shortcut" down from tree line. We ended up postholing with snowshoes in waist deep powder for about 1/2 a mile.
To give you an idea of the conditions it took us 13.25 hours to go only 11.36 miles and only 4196ft of elevation gain. Even if there were no avalanche conditions with the deep snow and winds if we would have continued it would have been about a 20 hour day. Either way it was still a fun day with two good hiking buddies and as always a really good learning experience. Thanks Jameseroni (James) and Dchild10 (Ryan) for a fun trip.
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