31. December 2020 to 02. January 2021
Winter in the High Sierra.
That’s the time when you get it all to yourself. We wanted to do a relaxed snowshoe trip around Horseshoe Meadows. A call the day before to the ranger office had confirmed that Horseshoe Meadow Road was open. We remained doubtful and had a back up plan to go up Rock Creek (a lot further north along the 395).
Is it turned out Horseshoe Meadow Road was in fact closed. We parked the car near on Rock Creek Road, which was closed next to Palisade Campground. We snowshoed up the road to Little Lakes Valley Trailhead. From there we went a bit further loosely following the trail which was all covered in snow.
We planned to party hard for New Years 2021 and went to bed at 07:15 p.m. with an outside temperature of around 15° F (-9° C). We thought about getting up and out of the tent if we would be awake around midnight.
Actually woke up 5 minutes to 00:00 and decided to go right back to sleep 🙂 Later that night temperatures went down to 9° F (12° C). Brrrrrr.
The next day we snowshoed around on real easy ground and made it up to Morgan Pass.
Spend another cold night.
We took a nice detour back to the car so we didn’t have to hike back along the snow covered road.
| Day: | Start: | Finish: | Distance [miles] | Elevation + [feet] | Elevation – [feet] |
| 1 | Rock Creek Road | Box Lake | 6.3 | 2031 | 252 |
| 2 | Box Lake | Morgan Pass and back | 4.4 | 1103 | 1103 |
| 3 | Box Lake | Rock Creek Road | 6.6 | 453 | 2228 |
