Mt Daniel Bears

With 2-3 days but a uncertain weather forecast, a friend and I bailed off some more ambitious traverse options and decided to see how Mt Daniel was doing. 

Our trip got off to a good start when we were able to drive all the way to the Cathedral Pass TH snow free! Scatter creek was definitely moving but was a non-issue for our Tacoma. There were no cars at the TH friday morning...when we returned there was a Prius (ballsy!) 

Hiking up the trail was typical spring shenanigans, with some low snow in the first .25 mile, lots of water running on the trail, and several large and somewhat complicated blowdowns.We hit continuous snow at around 4600', basically right at the junction with Trail creek. We were able to skin pretty easily all the way to Squaw lake, where we took off skis to cross the outlet and walk a short section of exposed trail before going back onto skins. From the junction, we skinned up to the divide and down the first switchback to Deep Lake; at this point we strapped skis to our backs and booted the alternating dry trail and snow patches towards Peggys Pond. We put skins back on for the last few hundred feet up the trees to Peggys Pond. The section from the Trail Cr. Junction to the divide is already a little thin in the trees and will likely get less continuous for skinning sooner than later. 

Coverage in the basin is quite good, at the moment. We camped in a group of trees just north of the pond which had a nice patch of dry bare ground and was fairly sheltered from the strong winds that night. It was quite chilly most of Friday even in the sun; as soon as the sun set behind Mt Daniel (~6pm), we quickly were forced to retreat to our tent. The strong winds materalized as forecast, but has mostly died by early morning. Peggys was still mostly frozen/snow-covered, but the creek just north is open and we were able to find a few places to get down and grab water. 

Sat AM we moved a little slower than planned and started making our way to the East summit. Despite what felt like cool temps and strong wind overnight, the re-freeze was not particularly deep, and steep east faces were already quite soft by 9 AM. We tagged the east summit and found our way to middle summit to contemplate our ski descent options. Given our slightly later than desired start and rapidly softening conditions, we decided to forego the Lynch glacier (much to my disappointment). Pea Soup looked a little less frozen than I would prefer to skin across, at least from our vantage point, and we were worried by the time we skied, skinned back up the Lynch, and dropped the Daniel 'glacier' (which faces E/NE), it would be way too soft. Luckily, the Daniel skied excellent! We stuck more skiers left (less ideal from a sun-angle perspective) because of a very large glide crack we had spied early in the morning. We skied about ~2000' of incresingly ripe (to slightly over-ripe) corn, then skinned back up to the ridge that separates the east bowl from the Daniel. We took another lap down a fun north-facing halfpipe feature, then slogged back up in the sun to the ridge one more time, and skied borderline too-soft sourtherlies back to camp. 

We had planned to stay another night, but given snow conditions, increasing high clouds and what felt like warmer temps, we decided we'd rather go get some mexican food than deal with another bad re-freeze. We hastily packed up and made a sweaty mushy exit back the way we came. Bonus came on the way out when we watched a young black bear ( who was very brown in color!) scamper through the upper meadows. 

*EDIT* - TAY site seems unable to upload my photos without throwing a fit. Admins - please, we don't want to see this site fall to the wayside! How do we maintain basic functionality?