High Sierra Topix

Just got back from a 5-day ski trip into the Emigrant wilderness starting from the Gooseberry XC trailhead with is right next to the base of the Dodge Ridge Ski area. What started out as a typical spring ski trip turned rather wintry in the last two days as a storm on the fourth day brought serious winds and a foot to a foot and a half of fresh snow and temperatures in the mid-teens.
I drove up the evening before, stopping on the way at the Stanislaus NF ranger station to get a wilderness permit. Since it was after hours, I used their self-service kiosk and filled out the form myself.
At the trailhead, the snow was patchy, and I could see I would have to walk a way before being able to ski. So, with plenty of daylight left, I decided to acclimatize and make my morning a little easier by walking up the road carrying just my skis, and leaving them at the point where it looked like the skiing might start – though it’s always hard to tell when you can’t see very far up the road, as there may be a pretty large solid patch followed by lots more bare road. I got maybe a mile up the road before it seems about right, and leaned my skis against a tree. No worries about leaving them there, as there were not likely to be any people passing by.
Back at the trailhead, I ate my sandwich dinner and settled in for the rest of the evening. In the morning, I ate a little breakfast, loaded up and headed out under blue skies. Temperature was mild – I don’t think it froze overnight. It turned out I was overly optimistic about where I could start skiing, as shortly after I reached my skis and started skiing, I rounded a corner to see a long bare stretch ahead. So, skis off and walking again. Maybe a half mile more and finally I could ski. This was probably around 7200 feet and at that point coverage was pretty solid on the north facing parts, and still patchy on the west facing bits. Before I got to the downhill ski runs that the route crosses, coverage was solid everywhere. The ski resort had closed the weekend prior, so of course the runs were empty. I can’t quite imagine trying to safely trudge across those runs going uphill with a pack on while the resort was running, you’d just have to hope the skiers and snowboarders had the skill to miss you, as you’d have no chance of getting out of their way. The route I was taking is a marked XC ski route laid out by the forest service, with little blue diamonds tacked to the trees occasionally. But for some reason, at each ski run crossing it takes some searching to find the route on the other side of the run. Generally, on one side there is an obvious marker and on the other, there is not, and since there is little use of these trails at this point in the season, and the runs were ins action recently, any XC ski tracks that crossed the runs are long gone. It’s kind of like following a poorly marked and little used trail, when I wonder whether it would be simpler to just navigate as if there was no trail. But eventually I did find the route each time, and by lunchtime I was at the main ridge and the end of the XC trail system. From there, after lunch, I carried on up the ridge, contouring around a knob just above the summer Gianelli trailhead, and stopped again for a snack just about where the slope steepens for the last ascent to Burst Rock. This was around 3:30, and it was either stop here for the night or keep going up and over Burst Rock. Still feeling energetic enough, I kept going and after another hour or so I reached the top and got my first big view – up to that point it’s pretty solid forest.
There was little wind, and the sky was totally clear so I decided to camp just past the top, just slightly off the ridge where I would have light late and early. I was thoroughly beat by this point. It’s not that many miles, but skiing with a pack and gaining about 2700 feet on the first day is a lot of work and I’m not exactly a spring chicken anymore. So, I was mighty glad to have dinner and lie down and admire the view through the open door.

In the morning, the sky was still all blue. It had been a mild night, left the tent door open and there was not much wind, low temperature just before sunrise of 28 degrees. There is so much more process involved in snow camping that it takes a lot longer to get going in the morning. I like Kim Stanley Robinson’s description of snow camping as “extreme housekeeping”. There are so many little details you have to pay attention to constantly in order to keep you and your gear dry so you can be comfortable. Very little room for error in that regard compared to backpacking in the summer.
With the crust frozen hard overnight, and a fairly steep drop off of the ridge, I was not going to test my meager skiing abilities on an icy corrugated descent through the trees, so I started out carrying my skis until I got to easier terrain or softer snow. Soon I was down and passing above Powell Lake, barely visible through the trees as a flat area of snow, not the least sign of melting yet. Up and over the next rise in the ridge, and then the next which is more open and has nice views to the north of the Three Chimneys; and finally some moderate slopes down to the valley running up to Whitesides Meadow. There I found a nice rock for a late lunch. It’s always nice to have a good rock for dining purposes, where you can sit, take off the boots and relax for a bit. As I ate, I heard an odd sound which I could not place at first, and eventually I realized it was the creek, passing right next to my rock but completely covered in snow, gurgling mysteriously.
After lunch I left my pack and wandered around the meadow for a while. In places the creek was open, showing about a 6-foot depth of snow on the meadow. But nowhere did I see a safe spot to approach the open water, with the snow overhanging in most places and obviously running under other sections, so I would be melting still despite the open water. The creek was running pretty strong down there, and I could see areas where it had been higher, and must have been briefly blocked by an ice dam and run up onto the top of the snow. So melting was clearly going on apace down below and out of sight. I camped near the handy rock. Some clouds had been moving in and/or forming up, but they dissipated by the time the sun went down. And then the dew began to fall. As any fool should know, a meadow with a big creek, even a snow covered one, is a damp place to camp. But there’s no fool like an old fool, as the saying goes, and it was a nice rock.

I woke up to 19 degrees just before sunrise, and a frosty tent inside and out, which turned to indoor rain once the sun hit. But I had plenty of time waiting for the snow to soften before my day tour, so I got things dried out just fine after breakfast. I decided to do a little circuit of the ridges around the meadow, and headed for the east side and up to the ridge where I snacked and enjoyed the view under blue skies again. Then off around the circuit counterclockwise. All the surrounding peaks looked pretty wintry. In general, I had been feeling that things looked more wintry than I would expect in early May, not so much as to quantity of snow, but the surface in the forest not having so much of that “old snow” look – by which I mean lots of debris on the surface, needles and moss and such, that you see when there has not been any fresh snow for quite a while. But the runnels were beginning to form, and the sastrugi up on the exposed ridges, so it was starting to look springlike. Certainly, the corn window was wide open.
Back at my camp after the three-hour tour, I ate my second lunch. I saw bear tracks, fresh that day, passing right through my rock. Which means that the bear passed right by my campsite (where most of my food was sitting in a stuffsack) without even pausing to investigate! A truly wild bear, I guess. I packed up and relocated up the slope a bit, hoping that a little elevation would get me up out of the worst of the cold well and the evening dew. Clouds had been forming/collecting again, and by dinnertime it was mostly cloudy; but then it dissipated again and was mostly clear by sunset.
My new campsite also had a good rock (the prime feature I had looked for in selecting it), so once again I enjoyed patio dining.

The morning brought ominous change. Solid cloud cover and the cloud ceiling was just about at my elevation, maybe a hundred feet above the level of the meadow. 32 degrees at 5:45. No sunrise to speak of with that cloud cover, and no point waiting for the sun to dry anything out. So, breakfast, pack up, and go. In the back of my mind was that if the morning temp was 32, I had to hope it would not warm up much or I could be in for some rain, which is about the most depressing that that can happen on a snow camping trip. Turns out I had nothing to worry about, an hour or so after I started it was snowing and the wind was howling. Going over the first ridge the visibility was moderately poor. Fortunately, I am familiar with the terrain, having skied the same route once previously, and hiked the summer trail several times. But in the open area on top, I did have to brace myself with my poles to weather the gusts of wind, or I would have been blown over. As I worked my way up onto the second rise, between the Lake Valley and Powell Lake, the snow got even heavier and wind got worse – though here I was in the trees so I was partly sheltered. I had to break out the goggles to be able to face into the wind and see anything. And fortunately, there were trees, or there would have been nothing to see beyond a few feet. I managed to get over the ridge, but I knew I was north of the usual crossing, the notch the trail goes through. Dropping down, I found the obvious ramp that the trail follows to the top, so I knew right where I was again. But then I stayed too high in my traversing descent, which I didn’t realize until I saw that I was over near Powell Lake – further north and lower than I wanted to be. It was identifiable in the lulls, being the only flat area without trees anywhere around there. But I really did not know quite what part of it I was seeing, so I knew I didn’t quite know where I was very accurately. This was about noon. After some deliberation I gave up on my ambition of getting over Burst Rock that day – I was starting to get damp, and the exposed section on the top of Burst Rock Seemed less attractive in the winds that were now blasting through, was standing in a bunch of trees, mostly about a foot or so in diameter, and could see the trunks moving in their snow wells. And with visibility so low, it was getting hard to see the lay of the land to figure out where to go. Plus, not being able to see the edge of the drop-off up there could be an issue. So, I eyeballed the little nook I was in between the trees, decided it would just hold my tent, and started flattening it out. The tent just fit, and once I had it up, I got in, added more layers, then got out again to pack snow around the bottom to seal out the spindrift. Then back inside. While eating lunch, I broke out the InReach Mini, to confirm where I thought I was. It took quite a while to get a lock through the trees, but it finally did. I then pulled up a map on my phone – which normally I don’t use for navigation, being a paper map kind of guy – so that I could punch those coordinates in and see where that was on the map. Would have been hard to work out where those numbers put me on the paper map. Sure enough it had me right next to Powell Lake – but on the other side from where I thought I was. It was a good thing I had stopped, as from that point I might have wandered around quite a while without getting a clear idea of where I was going, likely getting wet and cold in the process.
Instead, I was under cover – but had to keep knocking snow off the tent as it was coming down fast. And that was how I spent my afternoon and evening – reading, listening to podcasts I had downloaded on my phone, and reaching up every so often to tap the roof so the snow would slide off, and then push outward at the base to keep it from pushing inward. When dinnertime rolled around, I did not want to fire up the stove, partly because I thought I would start a rainstorm inside the tent with condensation and melting frost, and partly due to ventilation concerns since I had things battened down as I tight as I could. Luckily I had started the day flush with water expecting to be on the move for a fairly long day, and I had plenty of lunch munchies to take the place of my normal dinner. The snowfall began to lessen and the wind to reduce slightly, so around 7:30 I got out to shovel snow away from the tent so that further depositions during the night would have somewhere to slide off to. Lo and behold, about a foot had fallen in the 7 hours since I set up – light and fluffy stuff, easy to shovel away from the tent. The temperature, which had been around freezing all morning and most of the afternoon, had now gone down into the 20’s. Back inside, I settled down for the night.

I was awake early, before it was light, and semi-dozed while I waited for some light. By 5:30 or 5:45 it was stating to lighten, and at 6:12 I opened the door enough to see that it was not snowing, and the visibility was considerably improved, and the wind very light if anything. 19 degrees in the tent. I opened the door all the way, set up the stove in the doorway and cooked up some breakfast. 17 degrees with the door wide open. First thing I had to do was melt some snow. But a whole potful of that fluffy stuff melted down to about a quarter of a pot of water, so I had to keep piling it in. A gleam of sunlight showed briefly above the invisible horizon before going behind the clouds, confirming what I had figured out the afternoon before about how my tent was oriented, and thus the direction I needed to head when I left.
I packed up, and after a false start occasioned by the forlorn hope that I would not need skins in the fresh stuff, I started the plod. I enjoy traveling solo, but it sure would have been nice to have someone – or preferably a troop – to share the trailbreaking duties in that deep fresh stuff. With good visibility, route-finding was no longer a problem, and the fresh snow was beautiful, peppered with the tracks of little critters. Bunny tracks were running every which way, some other smaller critter had left tracks I could not identify, and either a coyote or bobcat had ambled by – the tracks were too indistinct to identify, but clearly made by an animal about that size. I slowly made my way up to Burst rock, where no sign remained of my campsite. The wind was not bad, and the sky had by now mostly cleared. It was spectacular. The trees were plastered. It no longer looked like spring; it looked like winter was back. Continuing, I descended the west slope towards Gianelli, and stopped to take off the skins. I applied some Maxiglide, but I still had snow sticking to my skis, so I stopped again and applied more. That did the trick mostly, but I still had grabby moments all the rest of the way, where one ski or the other would glop up and not glide. So much fun! But it could have been worse – if the temperature had been warmer, I would have the options of carrying a 4 inch layer of snow stuck to my skis as I basically snowshoed the rest of the way, or leaving the skins on the rest of the way (I’d had no issues with snow sticking to my skins, rather surprisingly), or just walking and carrying the skis. Staying above the summer trailhead, I contoured around the first knob and then followed the ridge down. By the time I reached the XC trail system, I was already pretty beat, even though I was only about halfway, but it was all downhill from there! Unfortunately, not steeply enough down hill to mean that I could glide along, not in that deep stuff. So, it was a long downhill plod to the trailhead, which I reached about 5:00, pretty well thrashed. In the last mile I met snowshoe tracks, some folks had some out to enjoy the new snow that day, but I saw no one and my van was the only vehicle at the trailhead. Sorry about the sideways images, all my vertical shots end up that way once I attach them, and I haven't figured out how to correct that. Even worse, some shots that I wanted to use came out upside down, and when I tried inverting them on my computer and reloading them, they still came out upside down, so there is obviously a trick or two I am missing.

Cool report . So you chose to venture out with the storm approaching? I suppose reading in a tent can be kinda peaceful, but it always struck me as something best avoided.

I was out on Sunday, enjoying the fresh stuff. It always amazes me how fast it goes from deep pow to melted in the spring.

Weird that your *skis* were glopping rather than your skins. We had a little gloppy snow, but climbing NW aspects it mostly stayed cold.

Thanks for the report - I spent my high school winters skiing at Dodge Ridge (and have backpacked that area of Emigrant Wilderness in summer, long ago) but haven’t seen it from your perspective. I’m glad you had a nice (and safe) trip.

C9 - it would be great if I had the schedule flexibility to go only when the forecast is perfect, but that is not my reality at the moment. As to the glop, yeah pretty unusual. But I will say that where i had the skins on was exposed to the wind, while by the time i took them off i was in snow that had sun on it and not much wind so it was a different thermal environment, maybe that was it.
Grampy - it is one of those aras that is easy to get to and popular in the summer and fall, but it seems like almost nobody gets past Burst Rock once the winter sets in. Kinda feels like my own private wilderness in the snow season, i have been in three times and never seen snyone else or any tracks.

paul wrote: ↑Wed May 08, 2024 9:27 am
Sorry about the sideways images, all my vertical shots end up that way once I attach them, and I haven't figured out how to correct that. Even worse, some shots that I wanted to use came out upside down, and when I tried inverting them on my computer and reloading them, they still came out upside down, so there is obviously a trick or two I am missing.

Many people live in the Apple world, so images are encoded to indicate which direction is up or down. That encoding is Apple-specific. Many other people live in the Windows world, so images are encoded similarly, but with an industry-generic system. So, if the image is created by Apple and then read by a Windows machine, you might get strange results. If the image is created by Apple, it can be edited with Windows to give it a generic direction encoding.

Hey Paul, Glad you got out there, and glad you got yourself back. The snowy weather like that really adds a lot to the trip doesn't it? It sounds like you choose to go with a lighter, but less stable tent, and thus the need for snow removal drills throughout the storm. Had you planned for a longer trip Paul? Wise to hunker down before white-out conditions form, though that would of been even more of an adventure.
Your post storm photos are spectacular. It's good you didn't suffer more for skiing out after a heavy snow, though I'll bet it was a good workout.
Cheers, Ian.