Islip & South Mt. Hawkins 04-19-11
Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 10:30 pm
We started up from crystal lake ascended the Ridge Trail up to Islip. We tried to clear some of the medium to medium large deadfall that we could off the ridge trail.
It's actually in pretty decent shape. We lost the trail I think 3 times in the large flat sections about half way up. Thankfully its easy to find the trail again since it pretty much follows the ridgeline up.
After we got up to Islip there was still a ton of snow and the rock cabin up there was still covered in snow.
Since we didn't bring micro spikes or crampons we decided to head straight down from Islip on the ridgeline to windy gap. There was a decent use trail / drainage we were able to follow down to windy gap.
From windy gap the original plan was to head up the hawkins ridge trail to Mt Hawkins. Unfortunately about 100 yards from windy gap the trail was covered in about 4-5 inches of snow in large enough patches that crossing it without crampons or micro spikes was too dangerous. It was layered with ice underneath so we couldn't even kick steps in and make our way across it.
Defeated we decided to mountaineer up the ridge from windy gap. Made it up to the first rock craig, and had to turn back it was just too loose to keep going up. So we headed back down after strike #2. Decided to decend down windy gap into crystal lake and ascend up to South Hawkins via the fire road.
There were two very large drainages that had washed out large gorges in the fire road, the second drainage being the most sketchy with freshly fallen rocks debris mixed in with an ice /snow bridge between the two. Still we pushed on undeterred to make it up to south hawkins.
Thankfully that was the worst of the washouts and it was smooth sailing up to the peak, minus a bunch of fallen trees and logs.
We made it up to South hawkins took a nice long relaxing break and decended back down the same fire road back down into crystal lake to the car.
In total Matt's gps had 18.1 miles with about 4700' of gain. I think we spent just under 11 hours in total. We weren't trying to break and records and had a great time out.
A link to all my photo's here:
http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php ... d1c9111f36
It's actually in pretty decent shape. We lost the trail I think 3 times in the large flat sections about half way up. Thankfully its easy to find the trail again since it pretty much follows the ridgeline up.
After we got up to Islip there was still a ton of snow and the rock cabin up there was still covered in snow.
Since we didn't bring micro spikes or crampons we decided to head straight down from Islip on the ridgeline to windy gap. There was a decent use trail / drainage we were able to follow down to windy gap.
From windy gap the original plan was to head up the hawkins ridge trail to Mt Hawkins. Unfortunately about 100 yards from windy gap the trail was covered in about 4-5 inches of snow in large enough patches that crossing it without crampons or micro spikes was too dangerous. It was layered with ice underneath so we couldn't even kick steps in and make our way across it.
Defeated we decided to mountaineer up the ridge from windy gap. Made it up to the first rock craig, and had to turn back it was just too loose to keep going up. So we headed back down after strike #2. Decided to decend down windy gap into crystal lake and ascend up to South Hawkins via the fire road.
There were two very large drainages that had washed out large gorges in the fire road, the second drainage being the most sketchy with freshly fallen rocks debris mixed in with an ice /snow bridge between the two. Still we pushed on undeterred to make it up to south hawkins.
Thankfully that was the worst of the washouts and it was smooth sailing up to the peak, minus a bunch of fallen trees and logs.
We made it up to South hawkins took a nice long relaxing break and decended back down the same fire road back down into crystal lake to the car.
In total Matt's gps had 18.1 miles with about 4700' of gain. I think we spent just under 11 hours in total. We weren't trying to break and records and had a great time out.
A link to all my photo's here:
http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php ... d1c9111f36
