When: Sunday May 24th, 2009
With: Andreas
Goal: Summit the peak we missed with BoeAlps
I had a weekend off from BoeAlps so Andreas and I decided to use this as an opportunity to re-climb Silver Peak (well, a re-climb for me, a first for Andreas). When our BoeAlps team attempted the summit, we only made it to the ridge because many of our steps where through 3 feet of new powder! No BoeAlps teams made it to their true summit that weekend.
We got a late start, not getting to the trailhead until after 9am (probably closer to 10am!). When we got to the official parking lot I couldn’t believe my eyes—there was no snow! When the BoeAlps team did this trip we couldn’t even get to the parking lot, and there were between 2 and 4 feet of snow covering the lot (2 feet in the sunny spots).
We were also surprised to find many cars at the trailhead. The car that pulled up next to us, a few (overweight) men got out, donned their fanny packs and were on their way in jeans.
Rather confused we still continued to strap our snowshoes onto the back of our packs. We were weary and thought that they were ill-prepared or we were drastically over-prepared. This led us to leave some snow gear in the car that we later regretted (such as my snowpants). Fortunately, we survived.
We started on the Annette Trail and headed towards Annette Lake. It took many switchbacks before we actually got to the snow. We think the jean-hikers must have gone a different route because we were packing a solid pace and never caught up to them. We passed quite a few gully’s before deciding to go straight up one. (In retrospect, we should have gone to the Lake, and then come back to the closest gulley to the Lake). Also in retrospect, Ron tells me from the "right gulley" you can see the ridge/summit and it opens up at the top. Ours didn't.
The gulley we choose closed up before the top and we made our way through some rocks and trees, trying to avoid significant rock cliffs. We knew we were close to the ridge but we had to keep winding our way for the terrain was rather steep. Also, we didn't want to hit a rock cliff by the ridge making it so we wouldn't be able to top out on it. Fortunately we were able to find a good spot, and scramble up some rocks to make it to one end of the ridge--the end furthest from the summit.
We made it to pretty much the same spot as my BoeAlps team had before, and deemed it lunch time. We were tempted to walk the ridge to get to the summit but decided it would be safer to traverse into the bowl and walk back up to the ridge when we were much closer to the summit.
We downstepped from the ridge and once we got to the bowl we adorned our snowshoes (kicking steps with just two people and post-holing was not on our agenda). Andreas couldn’t stop wishing (and complaining) that we should have come from the other side of the mountain and brought skis to skin up the trail instead. (I don’t have skis/skins [skins being kinda like sandpaper that you attach to the bottom of your skies so you can go straight up the mountain without slipping/sliding back down], so I thought it was a terrible idea).
Once we traversed the bowl Andreas led the steps back up the steep ridge. Moments before I topped out, I slipped and fell about 15 feet down, I was just thankful I didn’t fall more. The sun made it quite hot out, so it was kinda relieving falling through the cold snow, but at the same time, I would have been quite content if it never happened.
On our way to the summit we went on/off of what we presume is the summer trail to the summit. I think this trail starts from Annette Lake.
The summit provided some great views and we enjoyed the sun’s heating rays and slight breeze. Although I was really sad when Andreas pointed out the clearcutting on the neighboring peaks.
Not long after we got to the summit the hills rang with the devilish motor sounds of snowmobilers. We were totally bummed out – our solitude was ruined. Fortuantely we couldn’t see these snowmobilers from our spot on the summit, but I did not-so-secretly wish they’d fall in Annette Lake.
On the way down we decided to avoid the ridge, bowl, gulley, ridge route and went down the other side of the mountain towards Annette Lake. We figured we’d hit the summer time trail eventually. This was a slight mistake on our part—we should have either gone back the way we came, or traversed further to the right instead of heading more straight towards the lake. Further to the right would have given us some nice downsteps but we also would have avoided any runouts to the Lake and ended up in a gulley which would have guaranteed our safe arrival back to the main trail.
Either way we were able to get really fun lofty steps down, and seemed to be down the hill in no time. And by in no time I really mean, once we got most the way down, we had to walk precariously through the steep woods, avoiding streams that were only covered in inches of snow/ice, and navigating through a lot of brush, hoping we didn’t find any runouts to strong for us to cross.
It was getting late (since we had spent at the very least an hour, probably closer to two, on the summit) so we didn’t stop much at Annette Lake, we were still a few miles from the car.
On the way back I couldn’t help but comment, multiple times, how insane it was that 4 feet of snow had melted in the month since I had visited with BoeAlps.
We were about to the car when we met a family who asked us “how much further to the lake?” We hated to tell them to turn around, but we assured them there was no way they’d make it to the Lake and back before dark. They didn’t seem to have any water or food on them (not to mention head lamps!) and we highly discouraged them from continuing. Fortunately they heeded our warning. We saw their car in the lot, they were from California.
We had a few lessons learned this trip, such as bringing more gear than you see your peers have (especially if those peers are in jeans) is totally reasonable. We also learned that it’s always OK to turn back to try a new path. There were a few points where although it would have lost us time, it would have been much safer had we gone back to our original path, held our heads in shame, and tried a new route. We vowed not to be “those guys” again.
You can view more photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7372593@N02/sets/72157619126691136/
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