Pacific Crest Trail Day 21

We were doing pretty good through nice forest with some huge old cedar trees when the boot path started to go down when I knew we should be going up. Checking my map, I confirmed we were diverging from the trail. We hadn’t seen a separate boot path, but weren’t far from the PCT at that point, so we decided to climb up through the snow to the trail to see if we could regain the path.

We did and got to where the trail was with much postholing to our waists, but it was completely covered with untouched snow. We were near a ridge with southern exposure, so we went up to that and saw a boot path on the far side of a small valley where the trail should be. Not sure how the hikers got there without us intersecting our path, but we decided to scramble through the valley and directly regain the trail.

Going down was fine since there wasn’t snow, but going up was another story. I kicked in steps in the steep snow and was rewarded with a waist deep posthole every few steps. The snow was covering bushes which created an air void below the snow cover and wouldn’t always support our weight. At times we were basically crawling through the snow because we were punching through so often.