High Sierra Topix

Went up to Red Lake Peak today. Lots of postholing in the early snow, wish we hadn't left snowshoes in the car. Up higher wasn't so bad as most of it was wind-packed.

BTW - they don't seem to be selling snopark permits at Kirkwood anymore...

Hi Cefire,

Welcome to HST! Thanks for the picture and the update on the snopark permits.

Cefire,

Sport and I climbed up there on Black Friday. We needed to work off our Thanksgiving dinner. I had planned on summiting Markleeville Peak. We got to Blue Lakes road and our public servants determined the public should not have access to public roads and public land. The gate was locked.

I had no beta at all about Red Lake Peak, but I did remember it looked steep but doable from 88. We got to the turnoff on the east side of the pass and saw "no parking avalanche danger" signs. I found a small dirt road, turned off and parked the truck. We climbed the east slope.

It started out steep with some vegetation.
It got steeper and the rocks were loose.
There was very little snow at that time.
We eventually made the saddle just east of the peak.
Did you climb the summit block?
We stumbled into some unusual sights on the trip down. Does anybody know what these are?
We will be back and climb from the west like you did. Can you still get snow park passes at the Shell station in Meyers?

Thanks,

-Russ

Hi Maverick, thanks for the welcome!

Cool VR! Yes, we climbed each of the peaks including the proper summit but didn't find a register up there. It is a pretty short trip from the snopark lot which is nice when you aren't sure what the snow is doing. We did the neighboring Stevens peak a couple of weeks ago; another short and sweet summit with fun options for scrambling.

Probably see you out there one of these days

Hey Russ-

The big pipe thingie that you saw on the way down is a "cannon" that CalTrans fires when it wants to break up any big drifts of snow, to cause a controlled avalanche. I think they run on natural gas or something like that. The pipe fills up with gas, and then it is ignited and the resulting BOOM causes the snow to go down the slope in a controlled fashion. They have a bunch of them on the ridge above Hwy 50, going down into Meyers from Echo Summit. Better small and controlled avalanches than uncontrolled big ones.

Nice views from Red Peak, thanks for the TR.

--F.G. Dave

Next time West side and we will place a summit register!

maverick wrote:Hi Cefire,

Welcome to HST! Thanks for the picture and the update on the snopark permits.

We climbed up there on Saturday. It turns out you can buy your Snow Park permit on line. Stay tuned for an upcoming report with pictures on current snow conditions.

Thanks,

-Russ

Vaca Russ wrote:

maverick wrote:Hi Cefire,

Welcome to HST! Thanks for the picture and the update on the snopark permits.

We climbed up there on Saturday. It turns out you can buy your Snow Park permit on line. Stay tuned for an upcoming report with pictures on current snow conditions.

Thanks,

-Russ

I was up in that area in early April.
When I asked about snopark passes at the store in Kirkwood an employee told me that they stopped selling them, but that I could use their public computer to buy and print from online. You have to be sure of the day you will use the one day pass and I wasn't certain of my exact plans yet, so I decided not to further investigate that suggestion.

My dogs and I hiked (with some postholing) Stevens Peak and Red Lake Peak as a loop around Crater Lake starting from the big pullout by the Alhambra Mine Road in Hope Valley. My kids used the hill at the start of the mine road to sled down. We didn't need a pass for that spot, but parking there probably wouldn't work as well when snow is deeper and lower in elevation than this spring and/or actively being plowed. Lots of skiers had headed up from there over the weekend, but we had the entire area to ourselves all day on a Monday.

A couple of days later I purchased a snopark pass at Sorenson's Resort in Hope Valley so my family could park at Carson Pass and do some more snowplay to and from Frog Lake.

Hi Sean,

Welcome to HST! Thanks for chiming in with that info, any pic's from the outing?