We departed Longmire at around 10:30am at 34*F. It was still around 32 to 34*F when we reached the trail-head at Narada Falls. We started out on the trail through the trees to the Stevens Canyon road, after a little ways on the road, the wind picked up significantly, and the skies started to drop snow on us. All the drifting and falling snow coupled with large wind gusts gave us some nice unexpected and unwanted exfoliation of the face... We trudged on along the Stevens Canyon road until we got into the trees on the east end of Reflection Lake near the pass and dug in to cook some lunch. All the while it was feeling more and more cold outside.
After lunch we headed through the trees on the North side of Reflection Lake and cut over to the Mazama ridge route. By this time I was really starting to feel the cold and it was starting to get to my fingers in my old worn out gloves. I'm fairly new to the cross country travel portion of snow hiking during a drastic weather change. I'm used to hiking to snowboard, or hell just riding the lifts most days. During cooking lunch my hands got a little chilly and I had to rotate which fingers were in the finger holes and which were pulled out and being warmed by my palms as we started hiking again. At this point I kept checking up on Lauren to make sure she was ok, but apparently that nice down puffy I bought her for Christmas was definitely paying for itself on this trip and helped keep her warmer than I was after our lunch break. The uphill on the way to the saddle on Mazama ridge was welcomed and warmed me back up to toasty. We cut some corners on the way down from the ridge to stay better protected from the wind on the way back to the parking lot.
After getting back to the parking lot I noticed I had mini cornices forming on the lee side of my car... We looked at the thermometer when we got back as well and it had dropped to 19 degrees, no wonder it was so damn cold! The hike was supposed to be a nice easy hike, certainly not a character building experience. It went well, and we hope to hike with Alice and her husband again!
