The reason we do training climbs is to get the mistakes out of our system before we are in situations with little or no margin for failure. If I keep telling myself that, I'll feel like less of an idiot for choosing not to bring my snowshoes on this trip. It's not like I forgot, either. They were there, in the truck, at the trailhead... and I made the concious decision to not bring them. Mostly because it was about 17°C at the trailhead and I could only see patchy snow on the slopes above.
The first day's climb was mostly snowless, and what snow we did encounter was well-packed. I was feeling nicely smug when we arrived at camp and it was clear that snowshoes were just unneccessary weight. We made camp at Bull-of-the-Woods pasture and I slept soundly.
At 5am, we got up, made a quick breakfast, and off we went on the Gold Hill trail. The sign said that it was three miles from the pasture to the peak. Immediately, I could see that this was going to turn into a disaster. The Gold Hill trail gets about 0.1% of the traffic of the Wheeler Peak trail, but the segment of trail we climbed the night before was shared by both and thus saw lots more footsteps than what we were climbing in the morning. Without the packing of hundreds of feet, the drifts of snow crossing the trail were deep. In the cold morning, the surface was still hard and I could walk on it with my boots. But I knew by the time we got back it would be soft and a post-hole disaster. Still, I felt like a dork for not bringing the snowshoes and said I'd put up with the post-holing and hopefully above treeline the wind would have cleared the way.
After over a mile of gingerly walking on top of the snow and occasionally falling in to my waste, I had to throw in the towel. The rapidly softening snow told me that the return journey would be an order of magnitude more taxing and I was starting to feel the strain on my hip flexors, knees, and ankles. I gave my GPS and camera to Minesh and Laura and they continued on in reasonable comfort with their snowshoes while I post-holed my way back to camp.
It took me about twice as long to get back as it took to get out and by the time I got there my joints hurt. The weather was getting really warm and I was able to lose all my layers down to a polypro T-shirt and still be comfortable. I packed up my bivy sack and my share of the group camp gear and headed back down to the truck. I was at the truck by 11:15am.
Unbeknownst to me, Minesh and Laura were reaching the summit at almost exactly this time. I figured they'd get there much earlier than that, but that's becacuse we were believing the "3 miles" sign. The GPS track log and personal reckoning of Minaura suggested that the actual trail distance was more like 5 miles, so there was an unexpected 4 mile round-trip. They made it down to the truck at about 4pm, and I was starting to get worried that they had been consumed by a yeti or something.
Anyway, the decision not to bring the snowshoes was a bad one on my part, but the decision to turn around when I did turned out to be a very sound one. Mineaura said that the snow got worse and didn't clear at all until the last hundred feet or so. That, combined with the unexpected extra 4 miles of travel, would have made my post-hole journey all the more awful.
We all got good workouts, which is what matters for this hike, and Minesh and Laura both set a new personal altitude record for themselves at 12,711'.
