View Benchmark with CraigL in a blizzard:
I received the following text at 5:00 AM this morning "You sure you want to do this. It is coming down pretty hard here". Hey, as long as I'm up might as well give it a go. The drive to the trailhead on Vintage View was downright scary. Going over the point of the mountain was terrifying. It was snowing hard and really blowing and I knew we would be in for some adventure.
There was already 3-4 inches of snow on the trail, so we were breaking it all the way up to the top. Once we got onto the VB trail the wind really picked up and in the exposed parts of the trail it was pretty strong and cold. Up on the summit ridge the wind was coming from the north at well over 40 mph. It was a nice test for my new windstopper hat and my ears actually got cold. I think the hat is really good, but the wind was just a beast. We tagged the summit and went straight back down and got off of the ridge as quickly as we could.
The run down was fun flying down in the snow. We were much slower than usual out there, but the effort was definitely harder than normal plowing through the snow and in several spots our tracks from the way up were gone. Other than the really high wind near the top I was warm and felt great out there. I'm glad we didn't bail out on this one.
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