[pct-l] Starting late...

[Georgi Heitman]

Don't count your snow drifts, or lack thereof too soon, Alden.  There's a lot more winter still ahead up there in the Sierra, and the Cascades too, for that matter.  Last year with bare ground all around Easter Eve, we woke up to 3 1/2 feet and counting of fresh snow, no power, (and no Easter Services, anywhere in our valley).  Now granted, this was in Shasta Co. (section N), but it's effects were felt from north to south throughout the various mountain ranges...it was one Big Storm.  That last storm, effectively closed the High Sierra at Kennedy Meadows (south) for, what?, a week? more?  Then again, at Independence, the leaders, numbering like 50 + hikers, were held up again, at least for a few extra days.  Tioga Pass, I believe, was another hold up.  People were flipping up here to Old Station to start hiking South.  Only the final 4 feet of white stuff we got that Easter Day, translated to 14 plus feet of impassable snow in Lassen National Park.  In fact, people who tried it (an at-the-most-2-day trip in the early summer) were staggering back into O.S.after being gone for 5 days, wet, hungry and exhausted.  Going North was just as bad...only that direction, people could get lost enough that rescue parties and/or the CHP helicopter were called out to make pick-ups.  People were making it (finally) thru the High Sierra before the PCT thru Lassen N.P. finally opened. It was an interesting year.  As a Trail Angel couple, Dennie and I had groups in double digits coming in every night for about 2 1/2 weeks or a little longer.  That one late snow changed expectations of probably 75 % of last summer's hikers...what they hoped to do and how they were going to do it.  They were late getting to this part of the state, except for those really early ones, who sort of hung around, or left for ' greener pastures'.  The herd of late hikers ran into lightning-strike forest fires in the Marble Mt. Wilderness in  CA, more of the same around Sisters, OR, and many couldn't even reach Manning Park, due to the forest fires in WA.  "Oh, if we'd been just a week and a half earlier, we'd have missed.....'.  The list is close to endless.  So don't think 'dry' too soon.  Ma Nature has a way of screwing things up right at the last minute.
Wait...don't worry yet.
Georgi, 
Trail Angel