Trip Stats
Trip Report
The weather for Washington was not looking good for the weekend, so we decided to head East to Mount Daniel in hopes of escaping the clouds and rain. Trevor and I arrived at the trail head around 7:30pm, a little later than we had planned and we immediately grabbed our packs and began the hike in. A year prior we had done this exact same tour, but this time there was no snow to be seen before Cathedral Rock. We kept a steady pace and finally reached Peggy’s Pond a little before 10pm. Not wasting any time, we went to work shoveling out snow and quickly set up the Mega Mid. Once finished, we promptly went to bed.
Around 5am in the morning, I awoke to rain falling on the tent – time to sleep in. Still hearing the rain at 8am and still in our sleeping bags, we mulled over what to do. I have to admit that packing up and leaving crossed my mind. Nevertheless, we decided to have a go at Daniel, weather be damned. As we made breakfast and began to assemble our gear, the rain turned into wet and heavy snow. Once skinning, the rain/snow completely stopped, although there was still a lot of fog.
We continued up through the wet snow and caught a glimpse of a couple hikers. We skinned up a narrow shoot and onto the flank of a ridge and after awhile we reached a large triangular rock, about 600ft below the summit, where we decided to take a break and grab a bite to eat. The sun miraculously began to appear through the clouds, although only for seconds at a time. We contemplated making a skin to the top, but decided against it as the skiing would be difficult with near zero visibility and no terrain as a reference.
After resting for about 20 minutes, we started getting brief sun breaks and we decided to make a break for it. The top slope was actually pretty nice, with an inch of new on a layer of wet snow. The short chute was a bit variable, with some wind affected snow lurking underneath. Once out of the chute, we traversed over to another pitch. By now, the sky was clearing up and the sun shining. We talked with a group of three hikers/climbers and made our final turns down to Peggy’s Pond, enjoying the corn snow.
