Hiked from 7000 ft to 11166 ft over about 2.5 miles. 1.5 of those miles were on this skree slope.
The first trek was pretty nice; trees, moss covered rocks, little creeks. When the trees left we had what was in the picture: lots and lots of rocks. It was a good 2000 or so feet of just rocks. Which is interesting since in the winter months this is a huge tourist attraction for ski/snowboard folk. Good thing enough snow covers the rocks. We saw quite a few jumps set out for snow jumps, as well as jumps for BMX bikers that ride down from the top.
For the last couple hundred feet, we were hiking through the snow. Fortunately, upon reaching the top, we all celebrated, then accidentally disturbed a herd of mountain goats. HUGE! I'd never seen any before, but they had this awesome beards, and were extremely angry we came near. There were 18 or so I believe. The alpha male stood over us on a large rock until we all vacated the area. Good thing they didn't chase us down!
On the way back down to the car, we stopped at about 15 raspberry bushes, and ate nearly all the the raspberries on each bush. Hope the bears didn't mind too much! It was a good back-to-the-car snack.
Overall, it took us all day to do this hike. Surprisingly going up was easy. Coming back down was so steep that I started to just ski-slide my was down the mountain. Which resulted in me falling. Hard. Oh well. I'd definitely do it again, and would definitely recommend it to other people. The view from the top was incredible!
No comments:
Post a Comment