Dragontail and Little Annapurna in Winter

Dragontail Peak and Little Annapurna

Crossing the frozen Colchuck Lake

March 3, 2015, 8am-5pm

Eric Gilbertson

The weather looked good on Tuesday, but I couldn’t find any takers to join me for a hike, so I set out solo. I left Seattle at 5am and made it to the base of Mountaineer Creek road by 8am. I unloaded my mountain bike, packed up my snowshoes, and started off.

I was lucky that there had been enough melting and refreezing that I was able to bike all the way up Mountaineer Creek road to the Colchuck Lake trailhead. The road was covered in snow, but I still made it. The trail was packed down from ice climbers and hikers going in over the past weekend, so I had no trouble following it all the way to Colchuck Lake.

Biking back

I crossed the lake, then switched to crampons and kicked steps up to Asgard Pass. There were a lot of descent tracks from climbers descending from climbing the Triple Couloirs route on Dragontail. At the pass I switched to snowshoes and started over towards Little Annapurna. It was pretty amazing to be going over untracked snow and have the entire enchantments all to myself, given how popular I’d heard the place was outside of winter time.

I broke trail directly over frozen tarns and made the summit around noon. The weather was perfect, and I soon descended back to the base of Dragontail. I then marched straight up the Dragontail Glacier and finished with a short scramble to the summit.

The descent was fast as I plunge-stepped and glissaded back to Asgard Pass, and back down to Colchuck Lake. I then hiked back to my bike at the trailhead, and had a fun bike ride through the snow back to the car. I made it to the car by 5pm and was back in Seattle by 8pm, for a 12-hour seattle-to-seattle round trip.