A call to the Peaks District office of the Coconino National Forest Ranger’s service on the 22nd convinced me that conditions on the Humphrey’s Peak trail were about as good as they’d ever be for a Winter climb of Arizona’s highest mountain. Snow line, according to the Flagstaff office, was just below the end of the ski runs on the trail side of the mountain, at about 9000 feet. At midway up the ski slope, about 10,800 feet, snow depth was 31 inches and well-packed. Up above tree line, the wind had kept the talus scoured more or less clear. Everyone in Flagstaff was praying for a heavy snowfall soon, so the snow bowl could finally open its ski slopes to paying customers. I prayed for continued cold and dry conditions so I could make my climb without fear of avalanches or complete obliteration of the trail.

I got my wish. We left Phoenix on the afternoon of Sunday the 27th and arrived in Flagstaff that evening, in order to acclimatize to the city’s 7000-foot elevation. Aside from myself, our group of three included Jim Whitfield, whose considerable experience in Winter mountaineering I considered vital to a safe climb, and Lynn Yu from Albany, who was visiting her sister’s family in the Phoenix area for the holidays. We had rented snowshoes for the trip, expecting to need them for the middle part of the trail as it climbed through the forest.

We slept until the leisurely hour of 6 am Monday morning, because I had been told that we’d need to get permits from the Ranger’s office to use the trail. It was a new rule, apparently intended to collect information on traffic around the ski slopes. My guess is that it will ultimately be used to restrict access to the increasingly popular wilderness area. In any case, the Ranger’s office didn’t open until 7:30, so there was no reason to get up earlier.

We got our permit, and finally arrived at the ski lodge (where the permit said we were supposed to sign in) at 8:30, where they were perfectly blindsided by our presence. They were not aware that the permit system was in place yet; a quick call to the Ranger’s office confirmed that it was not, since the slopes were not yet opened. And so after moving some extremely heavy barriers blocking the trailhead parking lot, we arrived at the trailhead at about 9 am, having wasted two hours of extremely valuable Winter daylight on our little wild snow goose chase.

We hit the trail at 9:20. The temperature as measured by my jeep’s incredibly precise digital thermometer was somewhere in the low to mid 20’s, a good 10 degrees warmer than we had expected. The 400-yard trudge across the glazed snow and frozen mud of the open ski slope was a bit slick, but once we got into the woods, the snow was well-packed, yet still soft enough and cold enough to produce the reassuring crunch of good traction under our boots. The trail had had quite a bit of traffic on it since the last snow, leaving a surprisingly level trail an inch or two deep that was as easy to follow as the trail itself in Summer.

We arrived at the sign-in box to find, not unexpectedly, no paper inside except a few pencil-blackened scraps left by other hikers. These included one entry from the previous day, a group hiking in to camp for the night and then returning the next day, which was our today. Having had the disappointing experience of having nowhere to register my existence on at least one previous ascent, I had brought with me a dozen of my own sign-in sheets made specifically for Humphrey’s Peak. I left them in the box with our names and our intention of returning more or less alive by sundown.

The trail continued with little change in conditions for nearly two miles, though the snow was obviously getting deeper, and we started occasionally postholing and sliding downslope on some of the steeper and icier spots. At the third switchback, where a scramble out onto the rockslide yields the first great view of Kendrick Peak and the valley below, the snow suddenly got deep and steep, and the trail became very indistinct as a result of snow having drifted over the trampled path. I had a momentary bout of anxiety over scaling this steep section, as this was my first experience with climbing a snow slope, so Jim clipped on his crampons and took the lead, kicking good steps for us as he went.

With that minor obstacle passed, the trail resumed the condition we’d grown accustomed to below. As we came around onto the southern exposure of the ridge at just below 11,400 feet, the snow melted away into alternating stretches of dissolving, inch-thick snowpack, wet ice, and mud. A few first downs beyond the small rockslide at 11,400 feet, the snow thickened up again, and then suddenly the trail, and the jumbled foot- and snowshoe-prints that had comforted us all the way up, vanished. Jim ten-pointed up the 45° slope for twenty yards or so and looked around for the trail, but found nothing that looked more promising than just heading straight up the slope sans trail.

After some brief uncertainty (on my part again, I’m afraid) we decided to follow Jim’s steps despite the steepness of the slope and the fact that neither Lynn nor I were properly equipped (footwear-wise) for a long 40° snow climb. But with some careful stepping, the pole-end of my ice ax, and Lynn’s ski poles, we eventually made it up another 150 feet or so.

At this point we were fast losing the comfort of our tree cover. The snow was getting hard and the slopes below a bit open, but above there was no sign that the snow cover was disappearing as suggested by the Ranger’s report. A few hundred yards to the North the slopes appeared clear, but that didn’t help us much, as where we stood it was a good 30 inches deep, with a long exposed traverse between us and the apparently clear ground. It was only another 250 vertical feet to the saddle, so we all agreed that up was the better option.

We sat down against the upslope side of a stunted tree and put on our snowshoes. We’d carried them all the way up there, after all, we figured we might as well use them. Besides, we hoped, the crampon-like claws on the bottom of the foot bindings might improve our traction. After only a few yards of creating our own switchbacks, this proved not to be the case; for over most of its area, the snow cover was too hard to kick level enough steps for the shoes to grip, and everywhere the slope was too steep to go up on points only. Jim switched back to his crampons and I went back to following his footsteps in boots only, occasionally using my ice ax to chop flat spots large enough to call a foothold. Lynn persevered with the snowshoes, and managed quite well.

Kicking steps for us was a tiring job for Jim, made worse by the inconsistent snow conditions, in which he’d first be standing on top of the hard surface with only his points penetrating, and then postholing up to the knee or higher in the 30-inch-deep cover. Finally we reached a few feet above the level of the saddle, and made a slippery and somewhat exposed, but otherwise easy, traverse to the saddle. It was very interesting, after laboring through deepening snow for the past four hours, to arrive on the snow-decked saddle and look into a nearly snow-free Inner Basin and out across the even less wintery surrounding plain. It gave the snowy slopes below a surreal quality, as if the snow were a computer graphic added on top of the real image.

From the saddle, the South face of Humphreys held a modest garnish of snow, adding an extra measure of scale to the picture. Only the saddle and the North face of Agassiz were completely snow- covered. It appeared that the Humphrey’s trail was largely clear above the saddle as it climbed around the outer slope of the summit ridge to the North, though we couldn’t see the condition of the last half mile over the shoulder of the ridge. In any case, a summit bid was out of the question, as it was already 1:40 in the afternoon. Had we started the hike two hours earlier, and had we all been using crampons, there would have been time, but of course hindsight is always 20/20.

We spent all of five minutes on the saddle’s Winter ice cap, blasted by snow and ice particles in the 40-knot gale that sweeps the saddle throughout all seasons of the year. It was not particularly cold, but as our main objectives on the saddle were enjoying the view and eating lunch, we decided to satisfy the former need and postpone the latter until we were back down on the trail where the wind wouldn’t garnish our meals with rime.

We retraced part of our traverse South from the saddle until we were back above the thin but reassuring tree cover, and after a few yards of very delicate stepping, made a simultaneous decision that the best way to get back to the trail was via nature’s sliding board. Having chickened out of the monster glissade down the 1200-foot slope below Trail Crest on Mt. Whitney five months earlier, I decided to take the first leap, once I had reached a fairly soft area of snow above a protected but open slope. I got a good slide, a bit under a hundred feet, and if anything had to kick and row half the time to keep from bumping to a stop on the mass of powder plowed up beneath my legs.

Jim picked a line a few yards to the right, where he had a clear slope of several hundred feet, but after a few score yards, he hit a hard patch and had to make a fast belly-roll to avoid hitting a protruding rock – which he almost did. His right crampon clipped the rock, adding an interesting bit of ballet to his ax-less arrest, and twisting his ankle in the process. We maintained a series of short glissades through the thickening trees the rest of the way, resting in between to scoop the snowballs out of our pants and boots. By sheer luck, my last slide intersected the trail literally two feet from the trail-side sign at 11,400 feet commanding “Stay on Trail – Fragile Tundra”. We had saved a good hour on this off-trail descent, so after continuing to the small rockslide twenty yards down trail, we climbed up on the dry rocks, kicked off our soaking wet boots and socks, and ate a leisurely lunch as our feet and pants cuffs dried in the warm Winter sun.

After a good half hour’s rest, we put on fresh socks, then our soaking wet boots, and continued on the long trail down. It was slippery, and with the air temperature now above freezing, a bit mushy, but the descent was made in good time and with little difficulty. One last glissade of about ten yards got us past the steep drift covering the third switchback, and shortly after 4 pm, we were on the homestretch across the ski slope. The sun and unseasonably warm weather had left this stretch a morass of ice and mud, but in five more minutes we were back at the parking lot.

Aside from a group of very noisy and obviously ill-prepared students who were entering the woods just as we were leaving, we had only seen one other person the whole time – that being a woman who had gone in around 1 pm to check out the bottom of the rockslide at the first switchback. All of these individuals returned to the parking lot during the 20 minutes we spent unloading and peeling off the unnecessary winter wear and our muddy footwear. My jeep registered a balmy 40° F as we pulled out of the parking lot at about 4:30, almost as warm as it had been on my previous visit over two months earlier.

In spite of the turnaround at the saddle and not having the proper equipment with us, the hike was a great success, and for Lynn and me, a good and exciting first experience with the easy side of Winter mountaineering. We had had the entire mountain to ourselves, a refreshing change from the Conga-line that usually threads its way up and down the trail in warmer seasons. At some time in the future I hope to return under similar conditions, properly equipped of course, and see if we can’t add to the record of infrequent Winter summits.