Bear Point Hike

 I hiked up to Bear Point with a couple of the Valley Wanderers. Initially it was only going to be Kim and me. But Kim brought Amy, a friend of hers, and Chris showed up at the trailhead unannounced like he usually does. It was a perfect day for the hike. Nice temperature and no wind. Bella ran ahead with Chris who was up in front, as usual. He finally got too far ahead so I had to keep Bella back with us 3 ladies. Amy said it was her first winter hike. Wow, I thought, what a tough hike to introduce someone to winter hiking. The snow wasn't too deep, so we never needed snowshoes. But it's a very steep trail and in many places, it was also a very icy trail. I was glad that my micro spikes are very new and still quite sharp. Even so, at times it was pretty treacherous even with them. There has been enough foot traffic that at least we didn't need to break trail on our way up. But we did need to divert around some particularly icy spots. When we got closer to the top, Bella took off running, so she could greet us when we arrived. She is quite the climber. We finally saw Chris once we reached the first part of the summit plateau. He had gone much farther over towards the official Bear Point and had come back to see where we were. We followed his tracks to the official high spot labeled Bear Point on the map. We took a nice break there and had some snacks and took the usual photos. It wasn't obvious how to get back to the route we had taken up and we just trekked back across the snow in the general direction. Chris was ahead and the 3 of us followed him. Finally, we decided he must have some other route planned because we were obviously not headed back to the official trail. He does like to do his own thing sometimes. I checked my AllTrails app and saw that we needed to make a hard right to get back to the official trail. So, we worked our way back and Bella found our old footprints. She is a great scout. We could see Chris way off to the left towards Mt Eklutna and at first, wondered if he planned to climb it. But he did finally turn down in our direction and eventually showed up behind us on our original trail. I always worry that we may have trouble going down, after a steep icy climb up. But we easily found safer ways down avoiding the worst icy spots. Bella tends to stay with me on the way down, so she was close by until we reached the Peter's Creek Trail. We all got back to the cars together. It was a beautiful 4-mile 3-hour hike.