South Sister

12 miles of hiking • 5000' elevation gain •

I swore I would never do this one again with no snow coverage up on the cone. Scree is the absolute worst hiking surface on the planet.

Well anyway, after seeing some of the recent photos of South Sister I thought that I'd give it a go, thinking that there would be enough snow up there to make the descent not completely awful. . . I was sorta right. SS so far as three or four inches of new snow, starting around 9500'. The crater was completely covered, with the north side summit area extremely icy. It was a little dicey getting up and down over there, but overall not a major headache. Microspikes would have been nice, but crampons overkill.

Considering it was a quintessential Indian Summer day in central Oregon, I expected more people, but there were only four of us on the summit, with a few more down below finishing out at Lewis Lake. Unfortunately no one was playing soccer in the crater, like last year.