A small group of us decided to attempt Rollins Pass this past weekend. Although the idea of actually making it anywhere on this trail at the beginning of January sounds absurd, we actually made very good progress up the hill.
Rollins looks like it is still getting a lot of use. There were a ton of tire tracks! Not to mention there were tons of cross county ski tracks packing down the snow as well. With no fresh snow, and the abundance of tracks, I figured we would make it to the Lake no problem. However, about halfway between the Jenny Creek entrance and the exit, we ran into some fairly large wind blown drifts that stopped our progress. That stupid sugar snow just doesn't pack and we were having to dig out each vehicle at the same spots.
We finally turned around and headed to Mammoth Gulch. But first, we stopped for lunch down in a very large open campsite area. Although the snow was deep, it was out of the wind, and was actually a perfect playground since the snow wasn't completely dried out by the wind.
Up Mammoth Gulch we started. We passed a few cross country skiers that looked at us like we were crazy. For awhile I thought we were following vehicle tracks again, but at some point they finally just turned into ski tracks. AT 1.5 miles, we came upon a very large downed tree. Looks like it had been there awhile. Morgan brought a chainsaw and we decided it was time for some trail ambassadoring so we could continue our adventure and block off the bypass other users were creating.
Like I said, it was pretty big, so we just cut a section out of it large enough for vehicles to pass by.
We continued on and although the progress was slow, we made about 2 miles in where the road splits into three trails. There was some fresh virgin snow to play in at the ATV parking lot/camping area, and with darkness creeping in, we called it a day about 4:30.
