In our First Blog Entry we talked about Table Mountain, an interesting feature that both offered a lower elevation summit (About 7200 feet) and was close to town. This combination made for a great cabin fever expedition prior to spring, following a mostly off-trail route that required tricky navigation to keep from crossing private land.

We made good progress on our first attempt, but then ran into deeper snow around 6500 feet and were forced to turn back with fading daylight. A month later, with the help of both an extensive warm and dry spell combined with the advantage of daylight savings time, we took a day off and gave round 2 a shot. We came across an old road cut into the hillside that helped us gain some time. I’m not sure what these poles carried decades ago, but other than a few old relics such as this, the only sign of recent travel we found on the road were the tracks of a wayward moose.

After only a few hundred yards the road began to descend where we needed to go up, and off-trail travel began. But this time, we traversed the right side of a vertical rock band that stood in our path where we had tried the left side on our first attempt. On the right side, an intermittent deer path helped us gain altitude quickly.

First sign of spring - While only a small sample of what’s to come, we haven’t seen anything quite like this for a while:

Eventually we reached the flat, mesa-like summit. The views didn’t disappoint:

With the summit of Table Mountain now under our belts and summer on its way, higher summits and longer trips await. Some of which can be seen in the distance here: