Avalanches from above

Who knew that trees could be as scary as wide mountain slopes?

On Wednesday, my friend Tricia and I and her intrepid dog Fletch headed out to snowshoe Heather Lake off the Mountain Loop Highway.

We chose that hike because I remembered it being a nice, easy stroll up to a beautiful mountain lake during the spring. And, also, Snoqualmie Pass has been mostly closed for three days, even burying a few cars in a roadside avalanche yesterday. That's not something you mess around with.

Not to be outdone, the Mountain Loop Highway had it's fair share of snow - I'm horrible at estimating, but I would say at least several fresh feet in the last couple days. We were the only ones at the trailhead (well, a few yards from the trailhead as the snow was too deep to actually get up there), prompting a friendly snow-plower to remind us that a little girl had died in an avalanche not far from there only a couple weeks ago. That trail, like Heather Lake, was also mostly wooded.

Turns out, the biggest danger for us were the massive clumps of hardened snow falling from the trees and pummeling us from above like a totally one-sided snowball fight. We just sort of had to stand their helplessly taking the abuse from above, hoping that the branches would break up the snow chunks enough to keep them from hitting us unconscious.

In what seems to now be a winter tradition for me, we made it most of the way up - having to crawl occasionally under trees that had fallen from the weight of snow - only to reach... nothing. Well, what we reached was a lot more snow and no way to find the trail underneath. Of course this led us to the obvious question: "Why did those two guys who passed us going down not tell us that the trail ended??"

We sort of clomped around (sinking more than moving, really) and finally decided that we were cold and this was probably a rather fruitless exercise since the lake could be two yards away or two miles.

Which leads me to a question: When you're snowshoeing does it really matter if you reach your destination, since isn't the main point to enjoy the off-trail solitude anyway?