Winter Hard Mox Attempt

Winter Hard Mox Attempt

Jan 14-16, 2022

Eric and Nick

Saturday – Double carry zodiac to frontage road, drag to Ross Lake, motor to near little beaver, bushwhack around ice/cliffs, packraft across river, camp at little beaver
Sunday – skin to Perry Creek, bail at 2200ft, ski back to little beaver, packraft and bushwhack to zodiac, motor back in dark to ross dam
Monday – pull boat up frontage road, triple carry back to trailhead

I’m trying to climb the Washington Bulgers in winter and Hard Mox is likely the crux of this list. Hard Mox is generally considered the most difficult Bulger peak in the summer. It is deep in the Chiliwacks in the North cascades with a challenging appoach, then glacier travle and a few pitches of rock climbing to get to the top.

I’ve previously climbed Hard Mox in the summer via the standard approach, which is to sneak in from Canada via Depot Creek. For a winter climb, though, I wanted to climb Hard Mox completely legally, meaning climbing from the US side. Access from the US side is difficult, especially in the winter, and I’ve spent a few years trying to figure out the best route.

A handful of parties have indeed climbed Hard Mox from the US side, and the route of choice has been to take the Ross Lake Resort water taxi up Ross Lake to Little Beaver takeout. Then they hike up a trail to the Perry Creek shelter, bushwhack up Perry Creek, and climb the Perry Glacier to link up with the standard summer route on the south face.

In the winter, though, the Ross Lake Resort is shut down and the water taxi does not run. They have a skeleton crew on site in the winter and a few boats are left in the water to allow access to the resort for the workers. However, when I called them up in the past they said it was not possible to pay anyone there to give a boat ride up to Little Beaver. One issue is that the lake level gets lowered in the winter by 50ft or more from summer levels. This is because the lake was created for hydro power, and the level is set by seattle city lights. A lower lake level in winter and early spring also gives more capacity for spring melt off to fill the lake while not overflowing the dam.

This lower lake level makes docking on shore difficult since the docks no longer reach the water level. It also exposes many tree stumps. Before the Skagit River was dammed and the lake created, many but not all trees were cut down on the future lake bed. The ones that weren’t cut down have been preserved by the water, but when the water level drops they start to stick out. This is very hazardous for boats, which is one reason I think the Ross Lake Resort doesn’t want to be water taxiing people around at low water levels.

So a water taxi is not an option in the winter. I considered several other possible approach options. The first was hiking in the trail from the Hannegan Pass trailhead. My proposed route would be to follow the trail to Bear Creek, then bushwhack up the creek to meet up with the standard summer route. This is about 25 miles of trail, plus 5 miles of unplowed road. I scouted this out in December 2020, and discovered the road is closed to snowmobiles, unfortunately. I skied up to Hannegan Pass, but wasn’t able to follow the route further that day. This approach could work, but might take two days to cover the 30 miles.

A second possible approach is to hike from Ross dam along the trail up Big Beaver Creek, cross over Beaver Pass, then follow the Little Beaver trail down to Perry Creek. That would then meet up with the summer route. This route has the advantage that it is mostly low elevation, so could be mostly snow free in winter and allow for faster travel. However, this approach is about 35 miles. Even in November starting at midnight from Ross Dam it took me most of the day to get to Perry Creek. This would probably also take two days in winter.

I really needed the full climb to take at most three days in winter, since I can’t take vacation with my schedule and just get two 3-day holiday weekends. So the approach needed to be at most one day, leaving one day for the climb and one day for the exit.

I next considered boating up and down Ross Lake. I have a packraft, and in theory that could work. In November on the same scouting trip I packrafted from Little Beaver back down to Ross Dam. I timed the trip so I would have a tail wind the whole way, but it still took the entire day. If I had been paddling in a headwind I would have had no chance. The packraft did not seem like a reliable option in winter, given how finicky the wind could be.

If I had a motorized boat that I could somehow transport to Ross Lake, then I could get to Little Beaver in any wind conditions in a reasonable amount of time. Ross Lake is unique since there is no easy road access to get a motorized boat there. There is a road coming in from the Canada side to Hozomeen Camp. But that has been washed out since November 2021. Also, it is unplowed in winter.

There are basically three options to get a motorized boat to Ross Lake in winter. The first option would be to snowmobile dragging the boat along the Silver Skagit road from Canada to Hozomeen. But I wanted to do this trip legally from the US side, so didn’t really consider this option. Plus, the lake is so low in the winter the boat launch from Hozomeen is still very far from the edge of the water.

The second option would be to put in at the boat launch on Diablo Lake, then boat 5 miles up lake to the takeout below Ross Dam. There exists a 1.5-mile road – Frontage Road – connecting Diablo Lake to Ross Lake for use by resort and dam workers. They take a truck on a boat from Diablo to this road, then drive up it to get to Ross Dam. This option is not available to the general public, though. But if I could somehow make wheels or skis and drag a boat up the road, then I could get it to Ross Lake.

The third option would be to carry the boat down the 0.6-mile trail from Highway 20 to the Frontage Road, then drag or carry it an additional 0.5 mile to the lake. This would require a boat and motor light enough to be carried on a regular hiking trail.

Motors exist for packrafts, but they are not powerful enough for such a trip in a reasonable amount of time. I have friends that have canoes with electric trolling motors, and that seemed like an option. I discovered, though, the electric motors are not super reliable in the cold, and the batteries do not perform as well in cold. Also, getting a canoe to Ross Lake in the winter would be a tricky portage on the trail. A canoe is also not super stable in choppy conditions.

I finally settled on getting an inflatable zodiac-style boat with an outboard motor. My friend Matt in BC got one in September and I tested it out with him boating up Stave Lake in BC to climb Mt Judge Howay. It compresses down to a size that can strap on a backpack and weighs 60 pounds. He had a 5 HP propane motor which was 60 pounds, and a 50-pound 5-gallon propane tank. It is made of extremely thick and durable plastic, and has five independent chambers, plus oars as backup.

The motor was supposedly more reliable than standard 2-stroke gas outboards since it was 4-stroke propane. Reliability would be crucial for me in the winter being way up Ross Lake with nobody anywhere nearby. The boat also had retractable wheels.

I ended up buying the boat from Matt and testing it on a few more trips in Washington to gain confidence.

Then in October I did my first test run for Hard Mox. I wanted to do my exact winter plan in advance to test things out. I’ve found the key to success in winter is extremely meticulous planning. It is critical to anticipate and have a plan for any little thing that could go wrong, and doing the exact same trip first in the summer is an excellent way to figure out things that could go wrong.

Talon and I put in at Diablo, boated to Frontage Road, then deployed the wheels and dragged it up to Ross Lake. We then boated up to Little Beaver and hiked up Perry Creek. We climbed the standard south route, and I recorded a gps track of a good bushwhacking route in and a good way up the Perry Glacier through some cliff bands to link up with the normal route.

I also gained valuable timing information and fuel efficiency. The boat fully loaded gets 10mpg, so one propane tank lasts 50 miles. The max speed fully loaded is 5.5 mph. We boated out at night using headlamps, but they weren’t very powerful. So afterwards back in town I bought some 4×4 headlights and a motorcycle battery and my friend made a setup that the battery could sit in the boat and the lights attach with waterproof velcro to the front of the boat. This would ensure great visibilty at night.

I still wanted to test the trail approach too, since if frontage road were snowed over in winter it might be tricky to drag the boat up.

Later that month Talon, Nick and I did another trip on Ross Lake. The main goal was to bring my theodolite up Luna Peak and survey to find the true heights of East Fury and West Fury (surprisingly I found East Fury is taller than Luna and is unexpectedly now on the WA top 100 list). But a secondary objective was to test the portage method of getting the zodiac to Ross Lake. We tried strapping gear to Nick’s e-bike to wheel it down in one big trip, but the trail was rough enough that didn’t really work. So we double carried the zodiac down to frontage road, then depolyed the wheels and dragged it down, then motored to big beaver. The portage method was a lot of work, but seemed more reliable than the Diablo Lake method. It took about the same amount of time, so seemed like a better option.

After that trip, though, I couldn’t get the motor to start again. I tested it out in Lake Washington and couldn’t debug it. I finally brought it to Ballard Marine, the only shop in the greater seattle area that fixes propane outboard motors. They fixed it up, and it appeared the problem was we had strapped it to our packs upside down, which is not good for an outboard. This had drained the motor oil and messed things up. This was a valuable lesson to learn in advance, and I now knew to strap it on my pack rightside up, and be diligent about checking motor oil levels.

I also started thinking about the best way to avoid tree stumps which might be problematic in the dark in the winter. I called up the Ross Lake Resort and they mailed me a tough-to-find map that had the problem areas roughly identified. Nick then found a topographic fishing map that showed the lake depth. I created a gps file that followed the deepest part of the lake from the dam to Little Beaver. This isn’t necessarily the middle of the lake, since the river meanders. I put this track on my watch so I could follow it while boating.

I got the motor fixed up by December, then by January I was back from international travels and ready for Hard Mox. I did one final test run of the boat on Lake Washington to see if the motor had indeed gotten fixed. Surprisingly, I was able to go twice the speed as before! I was able to hydroplane and get up to 11mph instead of 5.5mph. It seemed the shop had done an excellent tuning job. By then I felt I had done all the necessary preparation to finally give a winter Hard Mox trip a try.

It appeared the Presidents Day long weekend might possibly have enough stars aligning to work. There would need to be stable snow conditions, decent weather, long weekend, and partner(s) available.

An atmospheric river was hitting the state Thursday and Friday with rain up to 7000ft, but then it appeared to cool down and dry out over the weekend. We figured if the snowpack had a full two days to settle saturday and sunday, then by Monday it would be stable enough for a summit attempt. Winds were from the south during the storm, which would in theory scour the gully, which would be good for stability. My planned route was to climb a steep south-facing snow gully from Perry Glacier up to the west ridge of Hard Mox, then climb the two-pitch rock climb from there to the summit as I had done in October. That snow gully was what we needed to be stable.

Nick was available, and it seemed like the stars might be aligned enough to give the peak a shot. The plan was to start up Saturday morning after the rain ended, boat up to Little Beaver and camp there or a bit higher. Sunday move camp up to Perry Glacier. Monday summit early and get back to Little Beaver. Tuesday very early morning boat back and drive home in time to get a late start to the work day.

I looked at satellite images of Ross Lake and the Tuesday Jan 10 image showed what looked like ice extending from up lake

to about 1.5 miles south of Little Beaver. This was kind of unexpected. I’d looked at historical satellite images and this was extremely rare. Though, I guess in late December it had been cold statewide for a long time. The ice looked dark, like there was no snow on top, and it looked like melt channels in it. So it appeared thin. That was the most recent image, and with 8″ of rain and warm temperature expected thursday and friday we were optimistic that the ice might melt by then.

As a backup plan we considered we could maybe deploy the boat wheels and drag it along the shore, then boat across Little Beaver River to gain the trail. It was tough to tell from the satellite image if the shore was low-angle or steep, though. As another backup plan I decided to bring my packraft. Worst case we could walk or scramble along the shore to the Little Beaver River, which would be melted out based on the satellite image. Then I could paddle across towing a rope. When I got across Nick could pull the boat back and follow. I had previously done this when climbing Primus Peak in the winter to cross Thunder Creek and it worked well.

We expected most likely the ice would be melted, but if not it would only add minimal time to walk along the shore for 1.5 miles and cross the river. So the trip schedule still sounded reasonable.

Saturday morning we drove up to Ross Dam by 9am. For the first load I carried the motor plus propane tank (~120 pounds total) and Nick carried a load of climbing gear. I brought hiking boots and micro spikes for the icy trail, which was a good call. I wanted to carry the motor first since that could easily get stolen if left unattended in the back of the pickup truck. In the past I’ve had my car broken into parked along highway 20 and a bunch of gear stolen, and I didn’t want to repeat that.

For the second load Nick carried remaining climbing gear and boat accessories and I carried the boat strapped to my pack, along with a few remaining accessories in a duffle slung over my shoulder. It just barely worked out to get all the gear down in two loads. I had considered modifying my mountain unicycle with handle bars and a brake and strapping gear on that to get it all down in one shot. But, based on our experience in October this seemed unlikely to actually help given the rough trail. The most reliable method was just a standard double-carry.

By 11am we had the gear down on Frontage Road and started inflating the boat. I noticed the inflator wasn’t working well, but then I found a missing O-ring laying in the duffle. Then it worked for the first compartment. But for the second I accidentally twisted the hose so it snapped in half! Luckily I had some gorilla tape to re-connect it. In the future I need to get a spare inflator system to bring just in case.

As we were inflating the boat a truck drove by with workers from the resort. We waved at them and they waved back. I was a little surprised they didn’t stop and chat, but I guess they’ve seen all kinds of interesting things on the lake and maybe weren’t surprised by this type of boat.

We got the boat loaded up with the motor, deployed the wheels, and moved all the weight as far back as possible. Then we hooked a rope on front and pulled it down the road. It was a little tricky with the ice but we managed. I was a bit worried with the significantly lower lake level the road wouldn’t reach the water and we’d have to carry the boat down a steep bank. I’d once packrafted from Tenmile Island back to Ross Dam in April 2021 in the dark, and had to scramble back up to the road. This was at the lake’s lowest level of the year. But in the dark I didn’t look around enough to see if the road connected.

Luckily the road went the whole way down to the shore, and I think it will reach at any water level. Interestingly, we saw a snowmobile parked at the last hairpin turn. I think this is for the resort workers to use if the road is too snowed over for a truck to drive.

We put in and were moving by noon. The motor started on the third pull, which is pretty good for a propane motor. I’ve been told it’s normal to take 5-10 pulls. The skies were sunny and it was a pleasant ride on the lake. Unfortunately we weren’t able to go fast enough to plane with all the weight, so were cruising at 5.5mph. But this was what we had planned on.

The water fence near the resort was oriented a little differently than in october, and I was happy to be navigating it in the daylight. I was recording a gps track on my watch for ease of navigation on the way back if that was also in the dark.

Not surprisingly, we were the only ones on the whole lake. We cruised past the familiar points of Cougar Island, Roland Point, Rainbow Point, and Ten-mile Island. Once we passed Cat Island around 2:45pm I could finally make out Little Beaver in the distance. It looked like we’d be there within about 10 minutes, but then I noticed the water up ahead looked a little weird. It was like there was a line across the lake. I slowed down and inched closer. Then I realized what it was – ice!

Unfortunately the rain had not been enough to melt it all. It looked thin, but I didn’t want to try to push through it in an inflatable vessel. I motored to the east bank and saw a channel going through, but it was risky to follow it since it was so narrow. We really wanted to be on the west shore eventually. I motored back all the way to the west shore and the ice was continuous. It was basically exactly where it had shown up on the Tuesday satellite image.

I turned off the motor, deployed the wheels, then rowed over to shore. We pulled the boat up and tied it to a stump, then walked over to scout the shore. Just around the corner the ice was melted out, but the shore was a shear cliff. We could carry the boat around that ice and motor around the cliff, but then the ice appeared again back beyond the cliff. We were worried if we got past the cliff the water might refreeze over the next few days and then we’d be stuck.

We had the packraft, but didn’t think to use it at that time. It looked like the only option would be to bushwhack around the cliff. This seemed like it might not take too long, so we settled on that plan. We unloaded the boat, left all the boat accessories under a tarp, and loaded up our packs with skis and technical gear. I strapped on one zodiac paddle to my pack to use with the packraft.

We crawled up a small enbankment into the trees, and the bushwhacking soon got very difficult. The terrain was steep, with lots of dense blowdowns and low branches. It didn’t help that we had monster packs with skis, paddles, and ice tools sticking out the sides and we were wearing ski boots. We eventually got over and around the first cliff and dropped back down to the water. But then we saw another set of cliffs to get around! It had taken an hour to get that far, which was only a few hundred feet from the zodiac.

So we crawled back into the woods and continued. This time we stayed in the woods until we reached a stream that, based on the topo maps, was beyond all the cliffs. It was very slow going in dark, but we eventually dropped down to a low-angle shore. We followed this shore a few hundred feet to Artic Creek, which was too deep to rock hop.

I took off my boots, removed my socks and liners and slung them over my shoulder, then put my feet back in the plastic shells. I then waded across the knee-deep stream. I dumped the water out of the shells and put my liners back in. I’ve found this is a great method in the winter to protect my feet in stream crossings and keep my boot liners dry. The plastic shells dry super quickly after dumping the water out.

Nick made it across barefoot, and we continued along the shore. Luckily the shore was walkable for the next 0.7 miles, and we finally made fast progress. But just as we reached Little Beaver at a wide section we hit another cliff.

We decided to bushwhack around again, and this involved some sketchy moves above cliffs. Eventually just past a rope swing we dropped back down to the shore. I found a nice mellow put-in where the river was narrow, just across from the Little Beaver campsite dock. The dock was about 30ft above the water, but the shore looked low-angle enough to walk up.

I had unfortunately forgotten the inflator bag for the packraft, so we had to take turns inflating it completely by the mouth tube. For my pack I used the same method as previously on the Primus trip. I just strapped the skis on horizontally on the top, then wore the pack and got in the boat. This way the bottoms of the skis didn’t hit the boat and I could wear the pack. The alternative would be to strap the pack to the front of the boat, but I was being a bit lazy and just want to wear the pack.

We tied all my paracord sections together and to the back of the boat, then Nick fed out the cord while I paddled across. It was just barely enough rope to span the river, and on the other side I crawled out on a steep enbankment. Nick then pulled the boat back and followed me across. I found a much mellower take-out a bit down stream and guided him there. Finally by 9pm we were both across. It had taken six hours to cover the 1.5 miles that we had hoped would take 10 minutes in the zodiac.

We staggered up the shore to the campsite and pitched our tent in the small shelter. I appreciated the picnic table that stuck halfway into the shelter so it had one section that was dry despite the rain. We cooked up some ramen and assessed our prospects for the rest of the trip. It was a stroke against us that we now had to account for an unexpected additional 12 hours added to the schedule (6 hours each way getting around the ice that was supposed to be 10 minutes each way). We had alotted a bit of buffer time for uncertainties, but that amount was pushing things.

I pulled out my inreach and, as planned I got four messages of the latest NWAC avy forecast for our zone. At home I had written a python script to scrape the nwac.us website at a prescribed time, record the avy danger ratings and bottom-line text forecast, then enter that into my mapshare webpage and send me the information as four text messages to my inreach. It indeed worked perfectly.

The forecast was for more stable snow conditions than we had anticipated sunday and monday. So it seemed like weather was in our favor. We did some timing calculations and, if everything went perfectly for the rest of the trip, and we pulled an all-nighter Monday night, we could still probably get back by Tuesday evening.

We set our alarms for 3:15am and were asleep by 11pm.

Sunday morning we were up and moving by 4:15am. The trail started out melted out for the first mile, which we booted. But then the snow became continuous and we changed to skis and skins. It felt great to finally have slightly lighter packs and to be using the skis which had thus far only served to make the bushwhacking difficult.

The trail was in great shape with minimal blowdowns, just like in October. The snow was firm and we made descent progress. By 7:30am, 3 hours 15 minutes from Little Beaver, we reached Perry Creek shelter and stopped for a break.

Behind the shelter we continued into the woods. The snow soon turned to breakable crust, and there were quite a few blowdowns. We reached a dry streambed which Talon and I had easily cruised up in October. However, the snow wasn’t quite deep enough to smooth over the boulders, so we couldn’t really skin up the stream bed. Instead we had to go up the woods on the side.

We zig zagged up through the blowdowns in the breakable crust and stopped to take a break. Our speed was much slower than anticipated zig zagging around all the blowdowns. If we had just been on snowshoes we could have march straight up the stream bed as in October. We also got nervous about the descent. Skiing down breakable crust is risky, especially navigating around blowdowns. We would likely just want to post hole down. But that would take forever. Again, if we had just had snowshoes it would be no problem going down.

I did bring a pair of ascent plates for the steep snow gully near the summit, but those only work for going up steep snow. They don’t pivot at the toe like snowshoes, so don’t really work going downhill or flat. And we only had one pair.

Given our new expected speed it seemed basically impossible to get the summit and get back to town even by Tuesday night, even with pulling an all-nighter Monday night. It also seemed like a high risk of injury trying to get down the breakable crust. We knew the rain event had gone up to 7000ft, so those snow conditions would likely persists for a majority of the rest of the route.

The cards appeared to be not in our favor that time. Many stars needed to line up perfectly for the trip to work, and two of them (snow conditions and ross lake ice conditions) had not lined up. So we made the call to bail, at an elevation of about 2200ft.

We skied a few tricky turns down to be able to say we skied, then back at the shelter we put skins back on and skinned down the trail. We got back to Little Beaver campsite around 11:30am, and repacked a few things we had stashed in the bear boxes. I went to a vista to scout out the ice conditions in the daylight. I was thinking there was a slim chance that the river outflow had melted a channel to the east bank that might connect to the one we had seen from the zodiac. From a viewpoint 50ft above the water I might get a good enough view to discern that. If it indeed connected, perhaps I could packraft back to the zodiac, then motor up to Little Beaver and pick up Nick.

Unfortunately, though, I saw the channels did not connect. The channel from the Little Beaver River only went 1/3 across the lake, and the channel on the other side definitely did not connect. However, it did look like open water around the closest cliff and around a few near the zodiac.

We discussed and decided to avoid as much bushwhacking as possible by using the packraft. We would have one person packraft around the cliff towing a rope, then they would take out and the second person pull the boat back and follow. We could add our 200ft of climbing rope to the 100ft of paracord to make longer paddling “pitches”. It would be the closest we got to climbing on the trip, and at least we could use the rope we’d hauled all the way in.

I paddled across the river first towing the paracord, then Nick pulled the boat back. Then I walked along the shore to the edge of the cliff and Nick paddled to me there. He gave me the climbing rope and all the paracord. Then I fed rope out as he went around the first cliff.

He got far enough that I only had a few feet of rope left, after scrambling as far as dared on the cliff edge to give him more. Finally, he yelled back that he’d found a takeout. I pulled the boat back, then carried it back to a better put in. I wallowed through the mud to the good putin then got in and started paddling. With the single paddle I had to use a J-stroke like in a canoe, but it worked pretty well.

Around the cliff I continued paddling past Nick as he walked along the shore. I finally reached continuous ice and had to take out. There was about a mile of walkable shore ahead of us, so I deflated the boat and packed it on my pack.

We then hiked along the shore to Artic Creek and took a break there. There was a huge waterfall coming out of the trees, and it would have been tough to cross anywhere else. We took off our ski boots and made the crossing as before, then continued hiking along the beach.

We reached another cliff, but this one had ice on the bottom so the packraft trick wouldn’t work. It looked like we’d have to bushwhack afterall. We made a tricky scramble up steep slippery rocks and found an entrance into the trees. We then took turns leading up high into the trees and then traversing. We could have stayed high to meet up with our other track, but I was keen to replace the bushwhacking with more packrafting. It might take a similar time with the rope shenanigans, but was considerably funner.

After some tricky manouevers we found a line down to the cliff edge and a scramble route back down to the shore. Daylight was waning, but it appeared there was open water all the way back to the last cliff before the zodiac. So we decided to packratft the rest of the shore.

We inflated the boat and I strapped my pack to the front with the skis mounted along the sides of the pack. This was much more stable in the water than wearing the pack. I then led around the first cliff and Nick pulled the boat back and followed.

Then Nick led across the next and final cliff. This one completely maxed out our 300ft of cord and rope, but he got around. I then pulled the boat back and follwed, making it to the edge of the ice within 30ft of the zodiac. By 4:30pm, just at sunset, I finally took out. It had taken us less time and was considerably more fun using this packrafting trick than bushwhacking.

We decided it was early enough in the day still that we woul boat all the way back. We hadn’t seen any stumps on the way in and could easily follow our up course on my gps watch. Plus the 4×4 headlights could help us see and there would be no ice to worry about. We quickly repacked and loaded up the zodiac. This was now the part of the trip I was most nervous about.

I feel like I generally have control over my own human-powered speed and fixing mechanical gear items like skis and boots. But a motor involves a lot more uncertainty. If it doesn’t start, it’s a lot more difficult to debug, and we were very far up the lake. Granted, we could always paddle out, but that would take a long time and be difficult in the dark to keep a straight heading. This is the reason I got the most reliable motor I could find.

Before putting in we mounted and tested the headlights, but they wouldn’t turn on. We found a wire had gotten disconnected, and Nick quickly stripped some plastic off and wound the two leads together. I wrapped some gorilla tape around and then it worked fine.

We pushed the boat into the water, got in, then I rowed out to deeper water and pulled up the wheels. The propane tank seemed pretty light, and I was also a bit nervous about having enough fuel. My data points were all that it had a 50 mile range and we had only gone 12.5 miles, but maybe it performs differently in the cold.

Fortunately the motor started after five pulls, which is pretty normal.  We flipped on the lights and started back down by 5:30pm. I followed our exact up course, which I knew was safe from stumps. As it got darker our visibilty dropped in the low fog. I think the solution would be to be able to adjust the headlights to tilt down like low beams on a car, but unfortunately I had configured them so they were fixed. So I just slowed down.

It was kind of thrilling to be basically be navigating like an airplane pilot at night, flying by instrument. I made sure to keep on our same up course monitoring my watch, and went slow enough that even just being able to see 20ft in front of us we could avoid anything. Nick kept a close watch on the bow of the boat.

Eventually the fog lifted a bit and I cranked us back up to full speed. The farther down lake we got the deeper the lake got and the less risky it was for stumps.

Though, since I was following our exact up course it was very low risk.

After about three hours we reached the water fence and squeezed through the gap marked with the reflector cones. Some people at the resort shined lights over, and they were probably a little surprised to see a motor boat out on the lake at night in the winter. By 8:30pm we cruised back to the road at the takeout. There was a truck parked there, but luckily the road was barely wide enough that we could squeeze the zodiac around on the wheels. (Back in October this had happened and the road was too narrow, so we had a lot of trouble getting around).

We dragged the boat up to a small picnic shelter and decided to stay there for the night. There was no need to get home that night since Monday was a holiday, so we decided to call it good for the day. We cooked dinner at the picnic table and pitched the tent nearby. I then checked my inreach out of curiosity, and the updated nwac forecast was surprising. They said there was a foot of snow expected that night and avalanche danger was elevated near and above treeline.

I was amazed the forecast had changed so dramatically! It went from maybe an inch or less of snow forecast sunday night to a foot! There was no way we would have climbed the route in those conditions, so maybe it was good we had bailed anyways.

That night it rained a lot, and we were happy to not be stuck above treeline on the perry glacier.

Monday morning we left camp at 8am and dragged the boat on wheels the rest of the way up Frontage Road, then deflated and unpacked. We managed to get the boat up in 2.5 trips. I made one trip with just the boat and another carrying the motor plus propane. Nick carried two loads of climbing gear and one load of boat accessories. By 11am we were all loaded up and driving home.

Movie of the trip:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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