Day: 053
Date: Friday, 28 June 2024
Start: Sanford Creek
Finish: Granite Mountain
Daily Kilometres: 32.1
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1557.7
Weather: Cold early, then mild and mostly sunny.
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts
Lunch: Snacks
Dinner: Rehydrated meals
Aches: Dave - the usual niggles; Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: Crossing over Lake Ann Pass (12595’) was both terrifying and exhilarating. The ascent was long and steep in places, but the views from above the treeline were spectacular. At the top, however, was a huge snow cornice blocking our descent. From the edge of the cornice, the snow wall descended near vertically for more than a hundred feet and steeply for hundreds of feet after that. We dared not go too close to the edge for fear it might break off. Instead, we followed the footsteps of other hikers to a seemingly impossibly-steep rockface and saw how they had carefully stepped their way down the very steep snow slope to a rocky outcrop and then, from the base of the outcrop, slid on their butts down to the bottom of the snow slope. We did the same, but the first part was very scary, with one false move possibly leading to a very long fast slide onto some rocks below. We were very pleased with ourselves when we made it to the bottom, despite very wet and cold butts.
Lowlight: None in particular.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
It rained intermittently overnight and everything was damp in the very cold morning. It seems to take longer to pack up on such mornings and it was 6:20am before we began hiking in our wet shoes and socks from yesterday.
We planned to continue following the Mirror Lake Alternate, but to take a short-cut to save about 5km by going cross-country at one point and fording several streams. We were increasingly apprehensive about the fords because every stream we crossed seemed to be in flood and we had to ford several early on which we should have been able to rock-hop across in normal circumstances. As it turned out, the shortcut was fine with the crossings safe enough, though the water was flowing fast.
Soon after that, in a lovely alpine valley, we turned onto the old CDT route and followed that for 13km. There was a lot of climbing through lovely pine forest near rushing streams with occasional views, but we knew this was just a precursor climb to the final ascent to Lake Ann Pass, from which, we had heard, the descent was difficult. Our apprehension was building, and rightly so. The final part of the climb was strenuous, but the descent was downright scary (see above).
We made it down safely and it will be one of the memorable experiences of the hike. We passed Lake Ann, sitting pristinely at the base of the pass, as we followed the official CDT northwards. By this time it was late in the day and we found a lovely tent site by a roaring creek soon after 7pm on a nice evening after a satisfying day. Not raining for a change, either.
No comments:
Post a Comment