Icy Osceolas--3/14/16

Greeley Ponds Trail, Mt. Osceola Trail

7.6 miles roundtrip

3100 feet of elevation gain

3/14/2016

A warm thank you to Tammy Daugherty for donating $576 to Global Fund for Women through us.  This hike was in honor of Tammy's friend, Ms. Daisy Harper, who unfortunately recently passed away.  Hearing Tammy's description of Ms. Harper, I know she was a nice and loving friend, a wise woman, and a beautiful human being.  We are sorry for Tammy's loss, and we extend our well-wishes to Ms. Harper's family.  

We started this hike knowing that there was probably going to be a lot of ice on the trail.  Boy, that sure was the case.  We started out in Hillsound Pro crampons, but many ended up breaking on us!!

Here we are starting--sorry about the blurry picture.  As you may see, the trail was very icy at this point:

Here we are at the first water crossing.  After we crossed it, we weren't sure where exactly to go.  At first we thought that the trail was to the left--there was kind of a tracked out path leading in that direction.  However, we figured out that the trail was more straight ahead.  We ended up finding it.

A trail of ice!  It does get more extreme later.

And up we go--getting icier...

Ice, ice, ice:

A selfie hiking up.  This was almost past a lot of the very icy parts up to East Osceola.  I couldn't exactly take many pictures when I was on parts of trail that you needed to climb up rather than walk up.  You had to hold on to branches, hoist yourself up, get whacked in the face by branches, sometimes follow bypasses through the trees as best you could, etc.  That was how most of our hike felt -- especially on the descent, after most of our crampons broke!!  It was an adventure!

This is at the view point.  Both Osceolas are sticking up...East Osceola on the left, and Osceola on the right:

I had gotten to the view point first.  Now Mom and Sage are checking it out:

Onward to the summit...

My poles--orange and old--scratched up too! :)

Here we are at the summit of East Osceola!

Now we're heading over to Osceola.  Here's Sage coming down an ice obstacle:

More of my beautiful poles...

And here is the bypass to the chimney.  Surprisingly, this wasn't covered in ice like most other rocks on this hike.  It was pretty bare.  Note--there was also a bypass to the bypass!  We didn't need to take it, though.

That was the chimney.  We didn't go up it.

Made it past the bypass...almost there...

Yay...

We're walking up to the summit of Osceola!  I like this picture.

We're here.

There's a geological marker--Mom said that she had actually never seen this on Osceola before.  It's kind of in the trees, on the edge of the main ledge area.

Heading back down an ice-fest, this time with mostly microspikes since our crampons broke (!!) -- Mom is not amused with the company who made these right now...

I see cars!!

The end of a hard hike!  Oops--I got Mom with her mouth open--next thing I know I'm out of storage on my phone.  Ah, well.  Still a good picture.

On the way down there were some hikers who let us use their Microspikes (because some of our Hillsounds broke--who knows why?!).  The guy who lent us one was named Bill.  Thank you Bill!

We'll have another adventure next week.