March snow! Elk Mtn. to Elk Creek

We got a late start again. This time it was not just us, there was the Daylight Savings time change.
Anyway, We liked Elk Mountain so much we decided to go back. This time we planned to return on Elk Creek trail. It's about 7.5 miles. It took us 7.5 hours.
We knew the fun was about to begin as it was snowing on us on the drive there. Fresh powder.
The hike up Elk Mountain was not as bad as we remembered the hike down last time we were here.
It's only 1.5 miles up, . . . . except you gain 1900 feet in elevation. This is very steep. The whole time it was snow showers and we were the first on the trail, so we had to navigate.

The trail is hidden under the snow sometimes.

Parts of this trail are very steep, requiring quadruped locomotion (hands).


We had lunch at the summit, and took the picture now on the banner of this blog. The log looking thing to the left of the packs is a container containing a written logbook of peoples visits. We had brief sun, about 2 minutes for our lunch stop. We saw a couple who followed our footprints up. They seemed a little out of place, the girl was in sweat pants. Odd it was.

After lunch it was down the cliff toward Kings Mountain. This was exciting, you could not see your footing, and if you missed a step you would go down the fast way. Both of us probably strained something going down. As I am writing this the next day, I am still sore going up and down stairs.

This trip R was able to trick her old Gateway computer into uploading the Topo region onto the GPS. We needed it, the trail was not visible at all in spots.

Only one time we back tracked to a peak to get our bearings and compare to the map. It cost us about 10 minutes, but well worth it to know you are not lost.

The entire trip back toward Elk Creek was in about a foot of new snow and about a foot of old snow. Of course, this was only the last two snowfalls. The depth of real snow was about six feet at times. We were able to walk on top of the crust layer of the snow pack, plowing through the fresh powder. This was slow going. Every now and then we would break through and go hip deep before we got stopped with poles and limbs. We realized we were walking over the winter blow down trees covered in snow. Very slow going.

Finally at Elk Creek, we are going downhill. Maybe we would make it out before dark. The progress was slow again, climbing over trees while you are fatigued takes time.
This one was a work out.