Gotta Love the Mountains!

We have been duped by the weather more than once now. We will plan to go hiking, snowboarding or something else that involves being outdoors, then notice that the forecast calls for rain or storms and decide not to go. Then the day will not be nearly as bad as it sounded. Well today was one of those days. We had planned on going hiking on some trails that would lead up to Jefferson Park at the base of Mt. Jefferson. Then last night the weather report called for, not just rain, but thunderstorms. So we decided not to go. Then as I was watching the news in the morning they mentioned that the thunderstorms were already passed, so after some debate, we decided to go, albeit a little later than we originally had planned. It was will a bit overcast and a little rainy here and there, but we had a great time and really didn't need anymore time than we had. Here is the progression of our hike. You'll soon see why we didn't need anymore time!

We had to stop half a mile short of the parking lot because of a snow drift in the road. We had just gotten done saying, "I'm surprised we haven't seen any snow yet..."

Here we are at the trailhead. 4100 ft.

As we climbed, we soon hit patchy snow. It brought back memories of hiking the PCT.

At about 4500 ft. our trail became 95% snow covered. Luckily it was still pretty easy to follow and navigate...just follow the clear cut and look for small patches of trail!

At this trail junction, we could have taken another trail 2.7 miles to meet up with the PCT, which runs through Jefferson Park as well. We didn't have time to go all the way into Jefferson Park, but we thought we'd go a short ways down the trail to see if we could get any views of Jefferson.

Soon the trail looked like this...

And finally like this. At this point we climbed up on top and only took a few more steps. We decided it wasn't worth the effort and risk to keep going if we weren't even going to go all the way. This is a western slope, so they usually take much longer to clear out, but this is nuts!

We are so lucky to live near beautiful mountains where we can head out for a day to places we would have to take a week off to go to for vacation in the past. We will definitely come back here, but we'll probably give it a few more weeks (months?) to melt out a bit more!