EISPIRATEN

I made an unsuccessful mid-week solo attempt to do Baldy today via the Bowl.

There are lots of inaccurate and out of date signs on the road saying chains are required (actually the road is plowed and completely free of snow and ice), that there is "no access for snow play," and that parking was temporarily forbidden at Manker on Feb. 18. There was very limited parking available at Manker, but it looks like the county is working hard at widening the plowed area, so this will probably change soon.

There is a boot track from Manker to the hut, but a few sections of it are kind of sketchy and would have freaked me out if I hadn't had an ice ax and something better than just boots. I put on crampons, but micros or snowshoes could also have been made to work. In some places I found it easier to detour way above or below the boot track.

San Antonio Creek is running and accessible.

I had brought both crampons and snowshoes. Stopping at the Ski Hut for a snack, I saw someone about half way up the bowl, apparently struggling greatly to get up through deep snow. His tracks showed that he was wearing crampons. After a while he turned around and started coming back down. Figuring that he had demonstrated that crampons weren't working in these conditions, I put on my snowshoes and started up the bowl. I talked to him briefly, and he seemed to have worn himself out trying to get up the bowl. I got about half-way up the bowl with snowshoes and ice ax, but the bowl gradually gets steeper, and I was starting to have a hard time making progress in the deep, soft, wet snow. I figured my chances of being able to get up the steepest part at the top were not so good, and given the large amounts of soft snow, was also starting to worry about mishaps like having a cornice collapse on me. I'm usually pretty conservative about safety when I'm alone, so I decided to head back down.

This weekend will probably be just nuts at Manker, with half the population of LA arriving with saucers and sleds.

Thanks for the detailed report. It's always a good decision to turn back if something doesn't feel right. Midweek seems like the best time to go, as long as snow conditions improve.

Recent avalanche in Baldy Bowl:

Thanks for the info, @bapolis. I hadn't been aware of the So Cal Snow Avalanche Center, http://www.socalsnow.org/ . Looks like an excellent source of information. If I'm understanding correctly, this was at about 3 in the afternoon on Saturday, and was the second of two avalanches that day. You can see the preexisting tongue of the first avalanche over to the left. They describe it as a "dry loose" avalanche triggered by a skier. They say a dry loose avalanche has "increasing likelihood in the afternoon on sun effected slopes due to rapid warming." Seems like a good reason not to start up the bowl very late in the day. As a descent route, I usually come down on the south side of the bowl, which seems less avalanche prone in general.