Snowy Glacier Mountains Provide Eye Candy for First Hike of 2018
 You can never go wrong with a snowy backdrop of Sinopah, Rising Wolf, Lone Walker and Painted TeePee mountains surrounding Two Medicine Lake, and that is exactly what we had: a gorgeous view and nice start to the hiking season. We welcomed Josy on her first hike with the GiG. Four of us completed the 10-mile hike up the Two Medicine Road with a quick stop to see Trick/Running Eagle Falls. For the most part, the road was open, not requiring snowshoes; however, in the morning we faced many sections of black ice that slowed our travel and gave us a few heart attacks, thinking we might fall and break something. Mostly, though, we could step into the snow to avoid the ice. The snow was quite deep: at times, way over our heads along the side of the road where a plow had come through. To get into Trick Falls, we put on our Yaktrax. Luckily, the icy compact snow held us, so we didn't posthole at all. And the falls were beautiful, rushing through the subterranean cave portion (the top spring runoff wan't going yet). We found much different and deeper snow conditions when we arrived at the lake. At this point, we did fall through a few times, sinking to our waists, requiring some quad power to get out. Needless to say, we didn't walk around too much or get too close to the lake, instead opting for lunch on the porch of the camp store, but that wasn't without an effort to get into either. We had a huge berm of snow to step over and then down and then the railing to step over before we reached the picnic tables to enjoy our lunch. On the hike out, we came across many parties going into or just enjoying the area: split boarders climbing up and boarding down the sides of the road, bikers riding in ad then walking and some other walkers. And the black ice was gone for the most part, thankfully. We really kept a good pace (easier to do without snowshoes), getting back to the cars one and a half hours earlier than expected, so we decided to skip dinner and head straight home. We left GF at 6:30 a.m. and arrived home by 5 p.m. Who went: Susan, Josy, Sue, Katie |
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