This is the snowshoe route I’ve been wanting to make for a long, long time. Barlow ridge is by far one of my favorites places to snowshoe as it can get pretty remote while still being a short distance from exit points. In the past, I’ve always taken this route to the end of the Barlow Ridge road and then continued backcountry to the ridgeline. On some trips I got to a high rock formation with views of the highway down below and Mt Hood in front of us but was unable to make the route towards Barlow Butte (even though it was right there in front of me). Other times, I wasn’t even able to get to the rock formations and ended up finding my way down on steep slopes back to the Barlow Ridge. For a long time this loop kept to itself not revealing anything about it. But then, back in January, with very low snow, I tried the loop in reverse and was able to find the route. You can check the report on that trip which was fantastic. This time, it was our chance to finally do it for real and complete the loop and so we did. We started from the Barlow Sno-Park towards the Mineral Jane trail. Then, it was all uphill on the Barlow Ridge road. Much to our surprise, on a beautiful, bright blue sky and sunny day, there was no one else there. Not only that, we did not find any tracks going up. That meant a lot of work to plow thru a foot of fresh powder. At times I had to switch the front positions with others in the group so we could share the effort. Ramon, Lisa’s husband and a good friend of Val and I took the front for the most part as it was nothing. Once we got to the end of the road, it was time for backcountry so we headed up towards the ridge. On that uphill and checking my bearings with the GPS is when I realized why I had not found the way before. At some point we traversed a wide meadow where we made a lunch stop. While doing so, some of us built a big snowman before continuing on. Once we got to the ridge, we veered north following the ridge towards Barlow Butte avoiding the pitfalls of previous trips and staying on the right side of the mountain. Finally we made it to one of the rock formations that, on our adventure in January we climbed and discovers some amazing views. This time, we made the climb as well, and the views were even more amazing. Not only you get the whole White River basin and Mt Hood but we also got some of the craziest clouds we’ve seen. In the pictures you’ll see clouds resembling waves on top of the mountain. It was a really incredible sight. Then came some glissading to get down from the ridge and a small traverse over the butte towards the trail. Nothing less than a spectacular day!
BTW, check out that beatiful girl in the pictures! Isn't she something?
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