The trail was nice and clear when we started Saturday morning. If was probably close to 50 degrees on the trail that morning with a ton of people in the park. We took the mist trail up, which wasn't as easy as I had hoped because of all the people trying to rush by and there were a ton of people with tripods set up on the trail. It was a hot and sweaty climb up Nevada Fall and up to the Cloud's Rest/JMT junction where we were staying. We took our time and didn't set up camp until about 4 in the afternoon.
Saturday overnight temp. wasn't bad and we were on the trail at 8:30. We summited Cloud's Rest around 11:00 and hung out there for a good 2 hours before the bad weather started. Temps dropped easily 10-15 degrees and winds were probably 20-30 mph gusts. We started heading down around 1:30pm and made it back to camp by 3pm. We gathered all our water and firewood for the night. We met a really nice couple the day before and they came to eat dinner with us. We hung out by the fire and the weather got bad around 5:00pm and it was a crazy snow storm by 9:00pm. We didn't hang out in that mess for too long. Our water around the camp fire froze and so did everything else. My thermometer had it close to single digits that night and we woke up to a few inches of snow the next morning. We had to build a fire to thaw our things out to get on the trail and it snowed another 2-3 inched in the next 2 hours. It was an icy trek down. microspikes would have been nice, but all I had were my crampons. It was just icy rock, so we just took our time. took about 3 1/2 hours to get down and Yosemite was on chain control, so that slowed us leaving the park. I didn't have to chain up, but there were still a lot of people leaving that we had to wait on.
Overall it was an awesome weekend that I would gladly do again. It was tough going back to work the next day. I met quite of few people that were excited for the Firefall and so hopeful that some water might start coming down. I afraid that when there was enough to make it over, there wasn't any sunlight to light it.
Camp 4
Start of the Hike
Heading up the Mist Trail
Top of Vernal Fall
Climbing up Nevada Fall trail
Base Camp
Quarter Dome
Top of Cloud's Rest
Storm at Base Camp
Snow the next morning
Icy Steps down Nevada Fall
Icy Vernal Fall
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/24/2018 10:00AM by VengeanceASX.
