You know what they say about the best laid plans. The band was actually playing on Saturday night so we had to have a turnaround time that would get us home showered and fed and in Gig Harbor in time for the show.
We arrived to find about 5 cars in the parking lot at Paradise - one of which was blasting some 1960 Era Soviet music from his rig as he packed up. We hit the trail at just after 8 and we quickly found some icy asphalt paths heading up out of Paradise. The snow was nice and crunchy which made for good walking though.
The first section was shaded and we made good time getting to the Panorama Point area where there were some dicey - icy - switchbacks to deal with before hiking out to the Muir Snowfield. There the sun was shining and we could tell that the return was going to be difficult with "juicy" snow and posthole opportunities. We steadily climbed up the snowfield to 9060 feet of altitude - completing 3600 of the 4600 feet of total elevation gain in the hike, but with about a mile and 1000 feet to go we knew we had reached our turn around point.
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| The start of the switchbacks by Panorama Point |
Dave and Garry continued up following a skinning skier in a pink tutu for motivation while Pam and I headed down. We were only able to glissade one steep slope of any distance because the snow was wet and soft in the sun. The first couple of miles down the snow was mostly easy to walk with some post-holing, but after that it was a real workout with juicy snow more than knee deep that was messy to the point where snowshoes wouldn't have provided much help.
The last mile or so to Paradise we must have heard 8-10 foreign languages spoken by 20 or more groups. That is fairly normal on a sunny day up there, but it always reminds me what a great gift we have in our National Parks.
Be very well and more soon....
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