Snow Practice
Sunday, December 18th, 2022: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Southwest New Mexico.
This will be a short one. I’m planning some hikes over in Arizona in the coming week, so I didn’t want to drive far or use up a lot of energy today. I picked a segment of the Continental Divide Trail just south of town, starting at just under 6,400′ near the highway and climbing a ridge to a series of modest 8,000′ peaks. I’ve done versions of this hike several times in the past, and I expected quite a bit of snow up there from the past week’s little storm. I thought it might be good practice for Arizona, where I expected even more snow.
The day was forecast to be cloudy, starting in the high 20s. I didn’t expect it to snow. Since the drive was short, I got an earlier start than usual. Low clouds made it a dark day, and I was all bundled up, wearing my old insulated ski gloves.
After climbing through a maze of rocky foothills dotted with pinyon, juniper, and oak, the trail reaches the ridgetop and the ponderosa pine forest. Farther up the ridge, approaching the first peak, the trail meets a dirt forest road that services communications towers. In the past, the trail continued up the road to the peak, then dropped to a saddle before climbing to the second peak. But when I reached the road, I discovered that the trail has been re-routed around the west side of the peak to the saddle, so I went that way, and that was where I found the most snow, averaging about 6 inches but with drifts up to a foot deep. Boot tracks showed that another man had climbed up there in the past couple of days, but he’d turned back without reaching the saddle. I continued to the saddle and up to the second peak in virgin powder, and it started snowing pretty good after I reached the second peak.
That’s a windy spot, and the snow was blowing sideways, often in my face. But I generally love being in mountains in snow, and today was no exception. Snow makes everything magical, and I found it really exhilarating, especially after more started falling. I returned to the saddle and found my own route up to the first peak, and from there, continued down the road to the trail junction. It snowed for about an hour, then the sky tried to clear, but it was snowing again by the time I dropped from the ridge back into the foothills. What a wonderful opportunity!
