EISPIRATEN

To celebrate Valentines day, my gf and I decided to spend the day snowshoeing in the Mount Baldy area. 8) We arived later than expected at about 9:00 am. When we got there it was very cold outside with fresh snow everywhere and to the hilarious sight of people slipping and sliding on the way up. Well we started hiking with the goal of making it to the top of Mount Baldy since the weather was great, clear and not that windy. Once we were about half way to Baldy Bowl the weather changed, clouds moved in quickly and visiblity decreased dramamtically. By the time we made it the bowl we were hardly able to see the ski hut only about 100 feet away. While at the bowl we ate our lunch and watched a large group of Search and Rescue people practicing avalanche responses. One of them even asked us if we had avalanche beacons, since we didn't and the fact that the snow was sliding really easily, not to mention that we couldn't see crap we decided against going up the bowl and figured since it was Valentines day anyway we'd go home early. From that point we headed down toward Manker Flats and made it there in about half the time it took us to get up. Overall we had an excellent time even if we couldn't make it to the top, and plan to go back to try again in a few weeks.
On another note the drive down sucks on a Saturday, the road was litterialy a parking lot, it took us about an hour and a half to get down......

Pics if anyones interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/brian90620/ ... #slideshow

Great Trip Report Brian.

Nice Pictures.

It's good to know that the Search and Rescue guys are making people aware of the danger of the avalances. As this fresh snow keeps piling up on the older/harder icy snow underneath there's going to be some slipage and we will see some Avalanches soon, just a matter of time.

What a great day in the mountains.

Nice work.

Holiday weekends + Snow = Absolutely insane amount of people on the Badly Road = SUCKS - sorry it took you so long to get out of there.

Yeah, I had the same issue with the road on Saturday, but sounds like I was ahead of you maybe? Around 4 traffic stopped for us around the fish ponds. 30 minutes of sitting and then stop and go to the village. Looked lake a major accident in the village lots of fire trucks & ambo's, a lady directed traffic to the back streets of the village around the scene. After that things moved well.

I have a video up regarding such driving condtions:

Hey Brian - glad to see you got out. And I'm especially glad to see your girl didn't mind spending Valentine's strapped to a couple oversized rackets on her feet. You better keep her. And hopefully you spent a romantic evening with her Saturday evening.

Nice TR. Pictures look really nice. I'm going to try and head up there mid week, actually later this week.

TacoDelRio wrote:I have a video up regarding such driving condtions:

Cool video........I laughed the whole time because everything you said was true...

406: I was definitily behind you, we were "parked" on the road well before Icehouse Canyon........

Enfuego: My gf loves spending time in the mountians, especially in the snow.......and yes we did have a romantic evening 8)