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My
pack was particularly heavy this trip as I was carrying both my
rather heavy -20 degree F synthetic mummy bag and my four-person
mountaineering tent, plus extra cold weather gear such as my ice
axe, crampons, and heavier clothing. The Crawford Connector trail
was broken, but still had a pretty good layer of loose powder
on top of a somewhat icy packed base. This made for slow going,
and I was pooped by the time we crossed the footbridge over Gibbs
Brook and reached the Crawford Path. I was hoping that it might
be easier going beyond this point, since some hikers may have
come up the trail from the Crawford Hostel.
I
stopped for a drink and to adjust my hip belt, then continued
struggling uphill under my load. There were a couple of sets of
footprints preceding ours. One or two people were climbing with
snowshoes, and someone else was hiking with bare boots. And based
on the strange grooves in the snow, I figured that someone might
be dragging a sled up the trail. We passed the side trail to
Gibbs Falls but didn’t stop. After a while, we could glimpse
limited views back across the notch to the Willey Range.
We
trudged on upward as the day wore on, and my doubts began to increase
as to whether we would make it all the way to Mizpah Hut before
it got dark. To make matters worse, the snow began to get deeper
and more powdery the higher we went, which slowed us up all the
more. Suddenly, as we rounded a bend, two snowshoers appeared
on the trail just above us, coming down from
Mt Pierce. I asked them about the trail ahead. They hadn’t
been on the Mizpah Cutoff, but said that it was unbroken. My heart
sank, knowing that an unbroken trail would make it nearly impossible
to reach the hut that day. Then they said that they had seen two
guys with plastic sleds on Mt Pierce who were planning on coming
down via the hut, and that maybe their sleds would pack the trail
some. I sighed.
Barely
ten minutes after this encounter, I was surprised by the pair
in their sleds, who barely avoided running into Muffin as they
careened down the trail. They had just come down the Mizpah Cutoff,
and figured that their sleds had packed it fairly well. But as
Muffin and I continued climbing, I realized that although the
sleds had smoothed the snow down some, it wasn’t firmly packed
so the going was still time-consuming.
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