So as of last weekend, I'd been waiting for almost a month since Lindsey and I's amazingly-fortunately-timed trip to Crater Lake and the ensuing snowshoe to Watchman's summit for the weather to clear up on a weekend again enough so that I could a) reliably drive my car up to 7100 feet in the middle of winter and b) reliably walk myself up to 8200 feet in the middle of winter.
Pictured: Good timing.
After a few close calls that left me irreconcilably mopey over the previous few weekends, it seemed like Sunday was my day: the sky was mostly clear, it had been nearly fifty degrees for three beautiful days in a row, and I'd met someone the evening before who had driven up to the trailhead in a small sedan that morning (Saturday) and had had no trouble. As I left the house, not really knowing what I'd face in the place that gets the most snow in the contiguous U.S. per year but has only received about 30% of its usual snowfall to this point in the year, I grabbed a backseatful of gadgets: trekking poles, waterproof shell, ice ax, crampons, and snowshoes. As it turned out, lugging this shitload of gear on my back through four miles of snow was not a bad decision.
I was concerned about the drive up to the trailhead, especially considering that Lindsey had already taken her Awesome Snow Car up to the airport and parked it there as she was traveling for the weekend. So I was stuck with my ancient Mazda Protege. Now I have nothing bad ever to say about that car in normal conditions. But in snow conditions...let's just say it likes to slide into ditches. And with the road to Rim Village ascending from 4500 feet to over 7000...
Well, I needn't have worried. There were a few snowy patches once I'd gotten into the park, but most of the steeper sections of the road had at least one lane that was clear of ice by 10am. By a little before 11am, I was in the parking lot putting on my boots...
...and finding the lodge to be a hell of a lot more snowed-in that it had been a few weeks before.
Unsure of how much time it was going to take to do the hike (it had taken five hours to do the slightly shorter hike with Lindsey a few weeks previous) I didn't waste any time starting. Or going, really. Having already been on the West Rim Road once in the snow, and having found it really easy to navigate, this time I was free to revel in the details, to pay more attention to how different the area around the lake looked when it was covered in a metric shit-ton of snow instead of just a shitload of snow. I suspect Crater Lake is one of those places that will never get old to hike because the character of the entire place can change in the space of only a few days.
Random picture of the lake, just because.
The road on the way in was physically the same as last time: snaking into and out of view of the lake for the first few miles before arcing way out to the west and up around the shoulder of The Watchman toward the end (of my hike, at least), but the scenery was made up of so many windblown snow sculptures, mini-cornices, and pristine snowfields glittering in the angular, morning sunlight that I walked for a few miles in a state of mesmerization, not at all bothered by the snowshoes on my feet or the crampons and ice ax strapped to my pack. The snow was deep all around, but on the road itself it was packed down from the feet of many previous visitors, just deep enough to make snowshoes necessary but not so deep that I was in danger of breaking through even while wearing them.
Conscientious Crater Lake-goers make on cross-country ski trail and one snowshoe trail.
At the second good lake-viewpoint, a few miles in, I crossed paths with a rescue team, seemingly taking a break from their duties to enjoy skiing the bowl to my left. One of them, an older man with an traditional-alpine moustache and an especially jaunty hat, hailed me and remarked that I had "a good stride going." I joked in response that I was headed up Hillman Peak, so said good stride wasn't likely to last much longer.
Ski bowl with the rescue team in the distance. Hillman is the rightmost peak in the background.
I surprised myself by being wrong. By the time I'd gotten to the foot of Hillman Peak, with only one quick stop to take care of Bodily Function Duties, and hour and ten minutes had passed since I'd left the car. This was half the time it had taken Lindsey and I to make it to the foot of The Watchman, which was now behind me by a good half-mile.
My first good view of Hillman in the distance.
I stopped briefly, huddling behind a frozen pine tree to stay out of the recently-appearing howling wind, and ate some food and changed from my canvas pants into my snow pants, a trick that was harder than I expected it to be, considering all there was to stand/sit on was snow and I had to take my boots off to get the pant-cuffs over my ankles. Somewhere in here, either before I took my pants off or before I put my new pants on, I had a conversation with a guy who had snowshoed from the parking lot all the way to the park's North Entrance that morning and was on his way back. He'd climbed Hillman en route "for fun," and assured me that it would be easy and gorgeous. His hike distance, not including the peak excursion: ~20 miles. Mine, including it: ~7 miles. Nothing like getting the piss taken out of you by a Real Man just before you start climbing.
The tree I hid behind. Yeah, seriously. For scale, those horizontal icicles were almost as long as my entire arm.
Idiotically intending to keep up my DOMINATING pace, I launched myself at the mountain, following what I assumed was Iron Man's snowshoe track from that morning. Instead, it turned out to be snowshoe track of a complete idiot, and I completely idiotically followed it up about 200 or so feet in knee- to thigh-deep powder snow, with my goddamn snowshoes still on before noticing that it petered out right when things went from "hard" to "impossible."
I traversed a bit to the west, hoping to pick up another trail I'd seen out that way while I was on my way up. But the curvature of that part of the mountain's face forced me to either descend before trying to ascend elsewhere or ascend directly up a sharp slope that would have been an easy scree-run in summer, but was packed with a few feet of ridiculously powdery snow now. Being the stubborn ass that I am, I decided there was no way I was going to lose altitude, only to have to regain it later. I swapped out my snowshoes and trekking poles for an ice ax and crampons, stowed my extra gear under a frozen tree, and shouldered up the mountain.
The Watchman...watching me as I headed up Hillman Peak. You can see the trail/road grade running across the middle of the picture.
The next two hundred or so feet reminded me of nothing more than that scene in the Fellowship of the Ring book where Boromir and Aragorn just use their fucking arms and chests to push a path through snow that's almost as tall as they are. This was one of the most incredibly exhausting things I've probably done in my life, but I had to do it so briefly that it was bearable, and I was able to gain a slightly-frozen ice-ridge eventually and pull myself around toward the mountain's west face, and away from the powder.
Weird ice/wind sculpture at the end of the powder section.
From there it was the usual, super-awesome-feeling crampon-Spiderman shit as I scrambled up an ice field at something ridiculous like 40-45 degrees for a bit. I seriously cannot get over how awesome crampons make you feel when you're scrambling up an ice field. It's like having superpowers, and I'm always excited to have a reason to bust them out. I had actually just bought these a few weeks before:
And thank goodness that I had, because when I finally reached the summit block, I ended up needing all twelve points.
See, Hillman is notorious for its summit block, a dangerous and difficult free-climbing situation that's reminiscent of the larger, more horrible one at the summit of Mount Thielsen.
Pictured: Deathiness.
I'm not good at free climbing, or really anything above Class 2, and I was actually counting on the massive amount of snow to make climbing the block possible, since during the times of the year it's just dry rock, just looking at it makes my palms sweat. Well, the plan worked, though not really in the way I'd imagined it would. The entire block was basically a rectangle of ice coated in a bit of powder. So, for the first time in my life, I got to do a little front-pointing.
I had no rope, but the ascent was really just three or so sequences of 20-25 feet each, each time with a handy pile of deep snow right beneath me in case I fell. I left my other gear at the bottom of the block so I wouldn't fall and impale myself on any of it, and just set about digging in with my crampon "toes" and ice ax and working my way up the ice.
It's hard to see the scale, but this was basically what the block looked like. That rock sticking out on the left was a huge boulder the size of a few people.
It was a pretty exhilarating bit to finish off a great few hours of hiking and climbing, and when I reached the end I actually pulled myself up on to a small, icy platform that functioned as the summit. It was a bit treacherous standing up there in the wind, so I took in the view right quick and front-pointed back down (much scarier than going up, let me tell you).
The Diamond Lake area and the Sisters, from the summit.
Now, sometimes the trip down and back really is interesting in its own right. This time, it really wasn't. I used the GPS to navigate back to my gear cache, equipped myself, and sauntered back down the mountain, throwing in a few 50-100 foot glissades when possible. Eventually I was back in the shadow of The Watchman and from there it was just following the road back to the car.
Frozen pines during the descent.
I write that as if it was just a boring, everyday experience when really, Crater Lake's Rim Road in the winter is just about the most ecstatically unique and incredible place to hike I've been. But, in comparison to heading out, heading back, this time, was uneventful aside from the brain-numbing sublimity of the surrounding landscape. You know, just that.
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