Snow Bowl Hut Snowshoe

We drove to the south district of the Mount Tahoma Trail Association to snowshoe up to Snowbowl Hut. Due to the heavy snow of the last week, only the lower parking area was open, making this an 8.5 mile round trip with 2,000 ft of gain.
We were happy to have blue sky and sunshine on what was forecast to be a partly sunny day.

The road had been recently groomed and was easy to snowshoe on the well packed snow in the morning. In the afternoon, the warmth of the sun had softened the snow making it a bit slushy. In the spirit of "sharing the trail" we stayed to the side of the groomed area.













Found a nice patch of icicles on the way up.

Small tree completely covered and bent over with snow.

This is the largest pinwheel I have seen.

When we reached the saddle, we looked back across to the ridge in the distance to see High Hut. We watched as a pinwheel came down the hillside across the saddle.

On the turnoff to Snow Bowl Hut, we looked behind us and saw Mt Rainier emerging from the clouds (zoom).

In the other direction (center of the photo) is the gazebo, our destination.

Last stretch of the trail up to Snow Bowl Hut (the trail to the gazebo is behind Snow Bowl Hut and off to the right).

As we continued on towards Snow Bowl Hut, we could see the Goat Rocks and Mt Adams to the southeast.

View of Mt Rainier from outside the gazebo

view of Mt Rainier from inside the warm gazebo.
We had a nice long lunch break mostly to ourselves.

As we headed back down the trail, we enjoyed snowshoeing towards Mt Rainier.

As the clouds continued to be blown away, we had a nice view of both Mt Adams (left) and Mt St Helens (right) to the south.

Back at the saddle, we noticed many pinwheels had come down in the afternoon sun. Grateful to be on these trails in an avalanche free zone in these conditions.










Before reaching the closed upper parking area, we had another nice view of the top of Mt Rainier.