So, my wife who had originally planned this trip, had to bail out at the last minute, leaving just my buddy and I to head up.
We called the ranger station on Wednesday to arrange for a late permit pickup and he said, "are you SURE you want to come up here? Its FULL WINTER CONDITIONS" After deciding that we would in fact go, but limit our plans to whatever was reasonable, we stopped into the ranger station on Thursday morning to be informed that the road to the portal was in fact closed and that we would have to park at the lower campsite and hike in to the portal. Luckily, that was not the case as we were able to drive right up to the portal. I was sad to find out that I would not be eating that famous pancake as the store was CLOSED for the season. After taking about an hour in the parking lot, we headed up the trail around 1pm. About 2 hours too late in the conditions at hand. I had brought hiking boots, but ended up using my Sorrell after ski boots as the snow was ankle to knee deep the entire trail. If the trail hadn't been walked on before us, there is no doubt we would not have been able to follow it in MANY PLACES. We decided to try for outpost camp and then see where to go from there. About 4 hours into the hike, we met up with some day hikers. When we asked them how much further to outpost camp, they told us about 3 hours more. We thought they were kidding. They were not. When we crossed the ice and snow covered log at the creek, we took out our map and realized that we had more switchbacks to cover and that we had already been hiking about 5 hours. We got to the trail sign for Lone Pine lake and I decided that I had enough for the day. 5+ hours of hiking and it was almost dark. We pitched our tent in the snow, ate a quick dinner and turned in for the nite. Our temp gauge read 17 degrees and I had on every piece of clothing I brought with me. The next morning, we decided that we would be better off coming back next year. This was my first backpacking trip in 20 years and I already feel we did more than we planned on.
The scenery was beautiful, we saw bear tracks, we froze our butts off!!!! We made it back to the car in 2.5 hours.
Thank god it didn't snow again as we would not have been able to find the way back. I will post some video shortly so everyone can see the conditions.
On a happy note, one of the missing hikers came back to the portal to get her car out of the snow, and as luck would have it, the snow chains I brought along were the right size for her car.
She was VERY HAPPY and appreciative for everything and everyone who helped her.
