May 13-14, 2010, Stafford Creek, Little Navaho

I had not been up Stafford Creek with skis since John M and I did a 3 day wilderness patrol in 2006.  That was a trip! Skiing off the north side of Navaho, around to the Three Brothers SW Peak, etc. But my strength was not what it was then, and in part this trip was to see if I could still carry the skis and all my other stuff up the trail.

The basics: the road is clear to the parking lot, although even more bumpy than last summer. The exposed trail is in fairly good shape, with the first patchy snow at about 3900 feet. By 4200 feet the trail has about 50 percent coverage, with large mounds of rotten snow, making for slow going. The coverage looked (and was) spotty from here to my favorite 4800 foot campsite, so the usual skin up was not going to be possible. I decided to camp at the very nice campsite,  melted out, at about 4300 feet, to avoid endless post holing.

Early Friday morning I started up the valley on skis for a while, but then having  to boot  it. As I had hoped, I found snow at 5000 feet along gentle rib that extends westward from Little Navaho (6442).  Unfortunately, even though the temperature got down to 32 degrees during the night, there was a shallow crust on top of  rather rotten snow. Fairly large granules, but not yet sintered to any degree. I think this is the effect of the late additions to the snowpack. Since it was clear that there were not going to be any great turns, and that the sun was only going to make things worse, I decided to play it safe and not go all the way to the top. Oh well, a nice trip anyway.

Here's a pic of what I call 'Red Rock', with the summit of Earl to the far right.

There are more pics here:

http://cid-d9374555cbe355aa.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Little%20Navaho%20ski%20tour

In case of interest, I've included a few pics of the ski carrier I use to carry the skis over my shoulder. This is version 3, which I have not changed in several years and am happy with.

Larry