Saturday in RMNP, destination - unobtainable

We got up and headed to Rocky Mountain National Park Saturday morning, hoping to reach Ypsilon Lake above the Alluvial Falls area. Its a 9 mile round trip with about 2,000 feet of elevation gain to get there, so not exactly a walk in the park. We had our snowshoes in the car, but didn't want to carry them and I had forgotten the bungies needed to secure them, so off we went without them hoping to not encounter super deep post hole inducing snow.



The trail starts steep, and the grind continues most of the way. The good part was that the early sections had no snow, even in the shaded areas. We pressed on making good time up the climbing sections and stopping very little. We soon got to the point where we would cross the stream that feeds the Alluvial falls, and since we'd never ventured this high up in this area of the park, pics followed.



"Big Arms" for Linda


The steep terrain continued, but the dryness stopped abruptly when we crossed the 9200 foot elevation mark. Jill was optimistic about the snowpack level, and I was a bit pessimistic (I guessed 9k feet).



As we crested 10k feet, we were traveling along a spine which was pretty cool. The bad thing was that the skies were darkening, temps were dropping and we could tell a front was moving through. So you don't want to stop too long on the spine, especially when you glance over and see a smoked tree from a lighting strike...



We pressed on, enduring non-stop climbing end what seemed to be endless snowbanks. I ran ahead a couple of times to scout out, then called back to Jill on the radios. We had gone 3 miles of the 4.5 and didn't want to give up. Here Jill gives me the "not another climb look".



Shortly after cresting this climb, we ran into a flatter section. Of course, it was also completely snowed in with 3 feet of crunchy white snow blanketing the ground every direction. We followed some tracks and looked for the yellow tags on the trees, but we could tell we weren't going to get much further without snow shoes. So as I started postholing every step, I stopped turned around and grabbed one more picture of Jill trudging through the snow. We moved back to the flat area, ate our lunch then proceeded to zip back down the mountain moving rather quickly to avoid the cool temps and the storm that appeared to be very near.



We didn't hit our destination, but there just wasn't much we could do. We talked to another couple who had been up in the area trying to ice climb, and they warned of waist deep snow further ahead and that they ultimately abandoned hopes of climbing due to their inability to navigate the correction direction. Not exactly words of encouragement.

A good, tough hike regardless.