Mile High Trail

 Our Saturday Valley Wanderers hike today was along the Mile High Trail out of Eagle River. Just getting to the trailhead is a bit of an adventure along the icy steep road heading straight up from Eagle River Road with a bunch of steep hairpin turns. I'd hate to live up there and have to negotiate that road very often in winter. There is only room for a couple of cars to park by the trailhead too. The trail itself starts out very steeply until you finally get up on the ridge. Then it is a lovely ridge walk, undulating up and down hills towards Mt. Magnificent and on as far into the Chugach Mountains as you would want to go. The trail was mostly snow-covered but also quite windblown It varied from bare rock to 8 inches deep and was very corniced on the downwind side. There was no need for snowshoes but we all wore our microspikes. It would have been quite treacherous without them. One person had to go back because of prior engagements, and the rest of us continued on. There isn't enough daylight to go all the way to Mt. Magnificent so we set our sites on Tucker Point, a steep rocky prominence on one side of the ridge. It's easy to avoid climbing it if one wants to go all the way to Mt. Magnificent, but since we certainly didn't have time to do that, we thought we would try for Tucker. A couple of our faster hikers got fairly close to the top, and the rest of us were about halfway up when a freak snowstorm happened along and completely obscured the peak blowing sideways snow making the otherwise comfortable temperature quite miserable. The trail had become very steep and slippery and I wasn't too disappointed that we elected to turn back. Bella had forged ahead and was up with the two leaders. We all turned around and picked our way carefully down the slippery steep snow slope. Bella bounced her way down and led us through the poor visibility to the saddle below. The snowstorm cleared as quickly as it had arrived, as if it just didn't want us climbing up there. The views were amazing in all directions, and the hike down the ridge was very pleasant. I was surprised at how steep the trek in had been when I found myself slipping and sliding most of the way back down. I'm sure happy I had those spikes on my boots. 

Tucker Point