Winter Ascent of Snow Mountain

Roy Benton and I thought that climbing Snow Mountain during winter would be fun, but the rangers who we spoke with strongly advised us not to. Undaunted, we decided to give it a try. On 19 January 2013, we parked our car at the Deafy Glade trailhead at about 3,100' and began our hike at 11:15 am. We waded barefoot across the South Fork of Stony Creek, which was a little less than knee deep but icy cold! A few miles uphill we strapped on our snowshoes and, after hiking about 4 miles, we stopped just before 4:00 pm on a ridge at about 5,500', where we camped near the junction of the Deafy Glade Trail and Mountain Springs Trail. The following morning, 20 January, we left our camp at 7:30 am and hiked northward in crampons along the ridges for a few miles until the snow became softer, forcing us to wear snowshoes. The trails were buried beneath the snow and we forgot to take along a GPS, so we navigated by using a topographic map, a compass and dead reckoning, which was tricky. We paused frequently to try and figure out where we were and we occasionally wandered off route. After about 4 miles of hiking, which took us 4 hours, we reached the 7056' summit of the East Peak of Snow Mountain at 12:00 noon. We returned to our camp, arriving at 3:45 pm, and hastily packed up. We then hiked down toward our car, removed our snowshoes about half way down, crossed the creek barefooted in the dark, and arrived at our car at 6:50 pm. It was a relatively safe adventure with very little avalanche danger on relatively gentle slopes. A video of our adventure is posted here.

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