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Bison Peak - March 12, 2014
My wife, Nancy, and I started from the Ute Creek TH at 7:30am. It was about 12 degrees with a bitter wind chill. Our Wisconisn 2014 winter walks to work (-30 on March 3) gave us the tenacity to stick it out. We got out of the wind within the first mile and as soon as the sun was on us we shed the hard shell jackets down to just a fleece. The trail was very easy to find with little snow at the lower elevations.
We saw very fresh looking mountain lion tracks. The first set, in the first mile and half, walked right on the trail for about 100 yards before they head off into the woods only to reappear briefly another 100 yards up the trail. About a mile later they reappeared once more.
As we got up into mile 3 the snow became more comprehensive but we could make out a faint trench and were able to walk sans snowshoes without much problem.
Right around mile 4, just before the Brookside-McCurdy trail junction, the trench disappeared and post holing ensued. After a several steps and sinking to my thighs I looked up to Nancy, still standing on the surface, and suggested that snowshoes were now in order. She agreed.
From here we broke trail up to the plateau where the brilliant sunshine kept us quite warm and comfortable. Here we took off the snowshoes and stashed them by a large bolder figuring the rest of the climb would be windswept hard or bare ground. Wrong! We did quite a bit of post holing all the way to the summit.
On the descent, once we got back into the trees, much of the snow was disappearing.
Total time to summit 6 hours.
Descent 3:30 hours including lunch and photo ops.
All in all a gorgeous day.
We drove straight to the Eddyline in BV for Salmon BLTs and Crank Yanker IPAs.
My GPS Tracks on Google Maps (made from a .GPX file upload):
Brian, thanks for the info you gave us. Your tip on where we would need to put on snowshoes was spot on.
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