Anyway, we started from Manker Flats a little after 6:00am today and headed up. There are only small patches of snow below the ski hut. While we were hiking this portion of the trail, we were passed by the same dude who snagged the protected spot under the tree near the summit the last time I was up there. We spoke to him later at the hut and apparently he has been summitting Baldy weekly for a couple months. I didn't get his name, but that's okay; I got other names later.
I pulled out my camera to snap this traditional first shot of Baldy from the trail and discovered my battery was dead (special batteries for that camera, I had left one in the car). I specifically checked the battery status the night before and it showed a little green battery. Then again when I was getting a "dead battery" message I checked the status: little green battery. I had assumed a little green battery was the international symbol for a fully charged battery. But here I was, on the trail, with a little green battery status indicator, a dead battery, and no replacements. Those guys at Olympus are such jokers, ha ha ha.
So this is the photo. I wangled a few more from the camera during the day before the battery gave up completely (all these photos are linked back to my Flickr account):
The weather forecast called for colder temperatures than we have been getting lately, in the thirties instead of the fifties. In fact, it never got above freezing the entire time we were on the trail, which made for good walking. On the other hand, I had pretty chronic problems most of the day with numb, freezing or aching fingers.
We had a snack at the Ski Hut and donned crampons and gaiters for the ascent. It is very good crusty snowpack above the Ski Hut, with patches of exposed rock and manzanita I hadn't seen before.
Since I still don't have a helmet, I suggested we head up via the summer Baldy Bowl Trail over to the southwest. Lance is a strong hiker and he set the pace, but when we got to the top of the ridge and crossed out of the Bowl, I found myself oddly fatigued, it was very strange. Maybe this is altitude sickness, something that has never bothered me before. I really never experienced anything like it, but I had to sit and wait for a few minutes before I felt well enough to continue. I didn't have any more problems after that.
At this point we were above 9,000 feet and we looked back and saw clouds creeping up San Antonio Canyon from the valley below. I had always assumed the weather came from the north, but here it was coming up from the south:
We didn't think much of it at first. We knew the forecast called for "clouds" and until now the sky had been completely clear. The sky still was clear, as these clouds were actually below us. But it wasn't until the clouds came up into the Bowl that it started to get a little scary:
It wasn't really scary; we were prepared for cold, cloudy and even stormy weather, except for one aspect that occurred to me later.
For a while it looked like the weather wouldn't rise out of the Bowl, and we wouldn't be exposed to it until our trip back down, but inexorably it crossed over the ridge and climbed toward us. We hurried up to the summit, running into hvydrt, coming back down, along the way. We compared ice axes.
Lance got to the summit a few minutes before I did, and after tagging it settled down to eat a snack with a fellow we met up there named Rowan. Rowan and Lance were hunkered down behind a rock shelter, out of the wind, and made a nice picture:
It wasn't uncomfortable behind those rocks. All you had to do was stay out of the freezing wind.
While we were up there it occurred to me that if we found ourselves hiking though the clouds, we could find it difficult to navigate back to the Bowl. This worry gnawed at me as we walked back down the crusty slopes, into the clouds.
It was a legitimate worry. While we promised ourselves we would simply stay to the left, close to the ridge, at one point we found ourselves much farther out to the right than we had intended (visibility inside the cloud could be as little as twenty feet, though it was usually about 100 or 300 feet). We only realized our mistake when we noticed some hikers coming up a few hundred feet away.
Then I was concerned that we would miss the turn-off to the left, into the Bowl, and go blundering on down San Antonio Canyon. In fact, I just happened to look down to my left at the right moment to see some climbers heading up and realized that was the trail. We were about to walk past it.
The rest of the hike down was uneventful, except that it started snowing on us. Just a flake here and there at first, but by the time we were at the trail register it was really snowing, hard. We had fallen in with some other hikers, most of whom we had seen before. I think most of us have seen or met Shin, the older Japanese fellow who uses poles (he was the guy who came up and started breaking trail for He219 and me in February, and I saw him again the following week). He says he has climbed Baldy over 100 times.
When I got to my car it was covered with snow, as was the road out of Manker Flat. Driving in snow is not a skill I ever hope to have to develop, and it's pretty terrifying, especially in a torquey RWD V8 coupe that weights 4,000lbs. Despite creeping along at four miles per hour with my hazards flashing, I twice lost control on the way down, but was saved by the ABS, which makes a hideous rattling noise when it engages.
My weekend schedule is filling fast, but Lance and I are scheming to go back up next Saturday. This time the plan is that I bring a helmet and we ascend the Bowl.
. Very nice TR. Thanks for letting me tag along - it was one of my most enjoyable and memorable days in the mountains.
