This is the second or third time I do this route and every time I like it even more. The weather forecast for the day was kind of a mix, cloudy with chances of precipitation but also some sun so we didn’t know what to expect. After meeting in the usual place and heading up there, it seemed the day was going to be overcast and not very good. In the pictures you’ll see that for most of the hike up, following the old Barlow Ridge road, we had a very gray day. At some point though, a gust of wind cleared the sky and we had our first glimpse at a full blue sky in front of us. That did not last long but it didn’t stop us either. We continued up enjoying the views of the White River Basin as the road turned south to a shadowed area. As I had planned it, after a couple of hours we finally got to the point where we found no tracks to follow, just brand new snow (and probably the best snow of the season). From that point on, the idea was to turn around and go backcountry to the top of Barlow Butte and then head back down to the trail to return to the cars. This portion of the hike was just fantastic with deep snow and quickly changing weather patterns. When we finally made it to Barlow Butte, we were welcomed with a vey hazy day and very nice light for a couple of shots. We stayed there a couple of minutes just imagining the views as we couldn’t see anything. As luck would have it, as soon as we turned around and started heading down, the sky cleared out completely so we made a run back up to enjoy the real views, not the imagined ones. After taking all that in we started our descent which ended being a lot of fun. Hiking thru the trees on a steep down hill with lots of snow allowed us to slide, run, jump and pretty much tumble our way down back to the trail. Once there, we headed, under the sun, all the way back to the parking lot where we were received by some pretty amazing rays filtering thru the trees. How could someone not love this hike.
No comments:
Post a Comment