[pct-l] Russell Creek (Mt Jefferson - Oregon) crossing

[Judson Brown]

Re: why doesn't this exist every year.

This was, in fact, a big snow year for the Oregon and Washington Cascades.
And the year before, of course, was of record proportions.

My guess is not all of it melted in the summer of 2011. The winter of
2011/12 started innocently enough, even pretty dry, but we had a lot of
snow in spring, followed by cool temperatures.

So you had snow that, in places, never melted in 2011, followed by a 2012
where melt-out was 3-4 weeks later than usual. Voila; snow bridge.

It is not a permanent phenomenon; my crossing there in '07 was thigh deep
water, no snow to be seen.

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 3:02 PM, Dennis Phelan <dennis.phelan at gmail.com>wrote:

> This weekend my wife and I filled in a missing piece of our Oregon PCT hike
> which included crossing Russell Creek coming off of Mt Jefferson.  From
> various discussions and postings about advising that this could be a tough
> crossing I was prepared for it not being the easiest and expected a
> challenge.  Now I know that this late in the year, the streams will be down
> as this was a very dry year and the snow melt has almost stopped, but what
> we got was most unexpected; the creek was entirely covered in heavy snow,
> which was frozen solid.  I tested the snow and it was so solid that my pole
> hardly dented it.  We simply walked across the nice ice bridge.  The
> toughest part was not slipping on the uphill on the far side.  What I am
> really wondering is why doesn't this condition exist every year?  This was
> a low average snow year, it would seem that this stream would be covered
> like this more than not.  Anyway, I was sure glad it was this year.
>
> Dennis Phelan
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