Mineral Jane, Nov 20th

Although the snowshoe I did on November 13th to Twin Lakes from Barlow Pass was the official first snowshoe of the season, I would say this one was a real snowshoe. After a couple of days of heavy snowfall up in the mountains followed by a cloudy but dry day it was only logical that we would find good conditions. I picked the Mineral Jane trail knowing that few people go that route which gave us a better chance to break trail. We started from the Barlow Pass Sno-Park and immediately thought we wouldn’t have enough snow. The trail starts on a forest road that, later in the season, you can barely make. This time, being so early, it only had a couple of inches of snow. All that changed as soon as we veered off on the trail towards Barlow Butte. At first we started traversing on 6 to 8 inches of fresh powder that quickly went down to almost nothing at the junction between Barlow Butte and Barlow Road (Could they come up with different names?). For the first time ever, and I have done this trail more than a couple of times, we were able to see the sign and he board. From that point, the lowest in the entire trail, we stared climbing again on the Mineral Jane trail to the fork with Barlow Ridge. By then, we were in deep fluffy snow and spectacular winter scenery. We took a short break at the fork with the Barlow Ridge trail and took some group photos before continuing on the mineral Jane trail. Shortly after the fork, we found the second fork but decided to explore further on the road. That lead us nowhere interesting, so we turned around and took the side trail that had pristine new snow for us to break. After a short lunch stop, we continued on the side of the creek looking for a good spot to cross. We found several logs that looked promising so some of us crossed on them while the rest of the group, counting on the low waters, just crossed the creek. From that point, everything got even better. We got deeper snow, more untouched trails and even some bushwhacking. We crossed the creek at least a couple more times. As time was going by, we had to decide whether we wanted to continue to white river and loop around (which was my original plan) or head for the highway and hike back to the parking lot. We all went for the second option which was not the most appealing but the one that would get us back quicker to the cars. While doing that, it occurred to me that it would have been a lot better to organize this as a car shuttle leaving half of the cars at Barlow Pass and the other half at White River, oh well, maybe next time.



You can check the pictures here