Every year for the last 7 years I’ve been ringing in the New Year on the right foot at Paradise and this year we incorporated camping on Mazama Ridge to our annual snowshoe/skin trip. The last few months I spent designing and building my pulk system to drag along with us. We had a couple of options for camping, one was to stay really close to the parking lot, and the other was to head toward Mazama. Lyss said the views for photos would be better on the ridge if the weather cleared up, so to the ridge we went!
We arrived at Paradise at around 1030 in the morning to a beautiful, cold, and sunny New Year’s Eve day. The trail was pretty well packed down to where we turned off of the Paradise River Valley road and began our climb toward Mazama Ridge. We probably should of went up a different route since there were a couple snow bridges over the gullies currently, but we went for the normal route I’m familiar with. On the initial little uphill it was so tracked out and chopped up by snowshoes that my skins were having trouble gripping as I transitioned between a nice angled ski track to a straight up the hill snowshoe track. To speed up the process and reduce tweaking my knee, Lyss attached in and muscled it up the last 8′ of the climb since she had snowshoes with crampons on. We swapped back and continued uphill toward the flats before the actual climb up Mazama Ridge began. Here we took a break, ate a snack, and watched the pending storm start to roll in as we began the hardest part of the journey.
I engaged the skegs to the 1″ lowered position and began to skin up across the slope. The pulk skegs amazingly kept it tracking well behind me, and the fairly rigid fiberglass pole system made the pulk follow me really well. We slowly continued our climb and rounded up the lowest angle of tracks to climb to the top. Thank goodness for that anti-reverse plate! Because when I needed a break, I was able to stop, move my hips forward, and then let the pulk slide back a couple of inches while the anti-reverse plate dug in and held the pulk weight. It’s definitely a bear to haul the pulk up the hill even though it really wasn’t that heavy. I really had to focus on making sure I was using a good skinning technique in order to have adequate traction and forward movement. Unlike if I were lugging a 70L pack, I was able to actually take a break on the hill and catch my breath without disconnecting or taking my pack off. If there is anything that will test your skinning ability though, dragging a pulk uphill will definitely find your weaknesses… As we approached the last bit of steep heavily wind scoured and highly uneven terrain at the top of the ridge, Lyss came behind to make sure the pulk didn’t careen down the mountain as I switched over to snowshoes. After switching over I kicked in with the crampons, and pulled that sucker up the last 20′ of windblown crusty wind lips. By this time the wind from the impending storm was starting to whip up, and make things more interesting. Like a test of whit and a challenge of resolve to get us to move quickly and get behind the trees on the ridge.
On the ridge we poked around east and south until we found somewhere semi-protected from the winds and let the circus show begin. 😉 It was our first night camping in the snow and in full on winter conditions. So this trip was really about learning to apply knowledge which isn’t always the most smooth of transitions till you have a system down. We brought way more layers of down than necessary, but with the goal of it’s better to be prepared than to be stranded in the winter we brought the extras!
We stomped down our tent space, and dug a little back to start building the wind break as the sustained 25 mph winds started to kick in… After feeling successful towards our progress we got our Shangri-La 5 shelter out and realized what we just stomped and dug out was way smaller than the small fortress we brought with on this trip. So… we enlarged the tent site. Where we were once several feet away from our wind break we had to actually move it back further and pitch the tent way too close to the wind break since we were butted up to the trees on the other side… About this point Lyss said we have moved enough snow that we should have tried our hand at making a snow cave, lol… This went back and forth moving snow around till we had a large enough space and had the pyramid shelter staked out. During this process at some point the tent pole had gotten stabbed into the snow, and the adjuster unknowingly came off somewhere deep in the snow bank. We of course didn’t realize this when we pulled it out of the snow the first time, since it is just a sleeve over the main pole, and we usually just use trekking poles in the summer with our various pyramid tarps. Between removing the pole from the snow, and finding out it was missing we had moved a lot of snow in the mean time… So we were out of an adjuster for the time being, so I improvised a snow pile to tighten up the pyramid’s tension. Lyss and I re-dug up our windbreak in the general area that the tent pole was put…. and eventually found the tent pole adjuster 3′ to 4′ under our wind break…
It’s moments like these that I realize I have the best wife on the planet for me. At no time was there really a moment of giving up, no tantrums, no panic, only the shear determination to continue on and solve the problems that came our way as a team. It is one of the best things about her is her utter determination to succeed and make things successful against all odds.
The tent was setup, and with a few adjustments and piling some snow around the edges of the teepee we got the wind to quit blowing snow through the tent. So now it was time to take out my previously trusty MSR Simmerlite and start to boil some water before we cooked our dinner. I dug a small pit outside the tent door to protect the stove from the wind. We pulled out the pot, which we will never bring on a winter trip again. I’m not really sure what we were thinking other than it was light, large capacity, and space efficient, but bringing the collapsible pot vs our other pots wasn’t the best idea… We should have left it when we left our collapsible mugs at home for the same reason. So we had to make a semi-unstable pot work, no biggie overall, but took some more finesse. The stove was burning crappy, so I had to shut it down and shake the jet clean, and start all over. The pump which was rebuilt before the last time it was used, didn’t seem to be building pressure correctly and required a near constant pumping to keep the pressure up to a semi-usable level. It had worked well on the previous snow trip… We slowly melted snow and filled the large 2.8L pot of water. Filling our mugs, and a 32oz thermos to test and see if we could have warm water in the morning without having to suffer through the stove again until the pump gets replaced. Luckily we had ate our massive lunch at around 1600, so we just ate snacks and some left over Christmas Twisties for dinner as we sipped on tea and chatted for the night.
The Western Mountaineering Down Flight pants and the Exped w/b down booties were definitely worth the sale price we found them for!!! It was about 15 degrees, 25+mph sustained winds with over 40mph gusts, and we were laughing about how toasty warm it was even when we had to be outside.
The next untested part of our system was the sleeping system, we brought extra lightweight Costco Double Diamond down throw blankets just in case our primary systems needed help. 🙂 The mats were the wide Exped Winterlite Downmats, and boy were those comfy and super warm, even directly on the space blanket and pulk tarp used for ground sheets. We brought 3/4 length closed cell mats that we wound up sitting on vs our sit mats, and we never needed them to put under the Winterlite mats. For a sleeping system Lyss used her 30 degree bag with my 30 degree quilt, down booties, down pants and some sleeping layers and she was toasty warm. I used my old Mont-Bel 25 degree super stretch sleeping bag, down pants, booties, some base layer tops and a wool beanie. I quit using this bag when I first got it 11 years ago, because it kept me too warm on almost every trip I went on it with… So what better time than to try it back out than in the winter? I was toasty warm, and never had to even put the hood on just a beanie.
Waking up warm, toasty and refreshed we pulled out the thermos and had some very warm water for coffee already ready! This thermos rocks! It was literally between our mats, on the groundsheet, and it was still hot 9-10hours later! The next test was the insulation of snow, to see if it really would keep a water bottle from freezing. Totally worked! The night before we poured some warm water in it to top it off, inverted it, and buried it for 10+ hours. After coffee and banana bread, we dug the tent out and started packing up to rush back to Paradise to meet our friends at 0930 to start the annual adventure.
As we crested the top of Mazama in 12″ of fresh snow with what appeared to be a right side up snowpack. All I really wanted to do was run a few laps on Mazama with my splitboard, but since I setup the meet time as 0930-0945 if the gate opened on time and Lyss suggested we drag the gear out in case we don’t make it back up, we trudged on to the trailhead. For the downhill I wore my snowshoes vs trying to snowboard with a loaded pulk for the first time down the mountain… We trudged down the ascent route and I stared at all the untouched powder I was passing up… Oh well, we were headed right back after we got to the parking lot anyway… One of the most beautiful things about the winter is that the landscape can repaint itself overnight with a touch up brush of wind and snow. All of the tracks from the previous day were filled in as if they were untouched snowfields under the 12″ of fresh pow.
We pressed on, and as we hit the snowed in Paradise Valley road, we were starting to wonder where the heck all of the hoards of people were, it was well past 0930. The gate must of been delayed, because someone should have already broke trail by now since we were behind schedule! I transitioned over to my splitboard and we started the long steady climb back to the parking lot. First Lyss ran into the rangers who gave her questioning looks about how her night out was, since she was only carrying her normal day pack/summer overnight pack as she neared the parking lot. I ran into them after her as I was a few minutes behind, since I stopped to transition over to the split for the uphill. The rangers informed us the gate would remain closed to the public today due to conditions, and that they were headed out for their annual ski tour and a moment of silence in remembrance of Ranger Margaret who was killed on New Years day several years ago in the line of duty. After a quick chat about conditions and stability, they were happy to jump on the well groomed pulk track to Mazama, one even remarked something along the lines of, “hey guys we don’t have to break track anymore!”
While we waited for them to return for our escort down the mountain, we went up the side of Alta Vista and I got a really short run in before heading back to the car to unbury it and get it de-iced for our return trip to have dinner with our friends that couldn’t make it up to Paradise. There is definitely an amazing feeling of solitude while winter camping that I will miss until the next time. We were 1 of 5 groups that actually stayed the night up at Paradise, and only 5 groups that actually got to see the beautiful blanket of fresh snow and enjoy the beauty of Paradise on New Years Day.
As we were escorted down the mountain, while one of the five groups stayed for another night. We radioed for the rest of our group on our way down. When we finally made contact we found out that at least 5 of the 7 people had found each other, and did their own separate trips on the Wonderland from Longmire with the hoards of people that weren’t allowed to go up to Paradise. We met up for our annual dinner reservations at Copper Creek before heading home. If you stop at Copper Creek the berry butter, and small fresh breads are amazing! The food is always better when they aren’t as busy as they are on the holiday, and are trying to keep up with the madness of New Years, but still worth it.
Adventures Through The Looking Glass 
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