4.5 miles of hiking • 4500' elevation gain •
I got my butt kicked on Loowit. I went with a group of friends; we've been planning this trip for a long time. The forecast did not look good, but it is so hard to arrange our schedules, we decided to go for it anyhow. We rented AT skis at the Mountain Shop, 4 of us doing this for the first time. Started at the Marble Mountain Snow Park, skinned up and came up via Swift Creek. The weather was actually pretty nice- snowing at the bottom and warm. The clouds started clearing when we came out of the trees and onto the Worm Flows, and we had some nice glimpses of the summit.
I had trouble with the fit of my boots and began to suffer blisters. I put on those fancy blister bandaids which helped, but I still had to deal with pain management- which made my trip less enjoyable, and I slowed the group down.
By the time we reached 7000 feet ( 4 hrs) the weather had turned again and the wind was blowing hard, no visibility. The snow was very crusty and we decided it was time to go down. We were pretty nervous on the first part of our descent because of whiteout conditions, just making two or three turns and stopping. We had one nice run of perfect snow for about 500 feet, then it turned into mashed potatoes. Very tiring to make turns, but we emerged from the big cloud surrounding the summit and visibility was good again. The bottom section was a hoot just skiing in tracks the whole way back through the trees.My legs were on fire, I've got to get in shape!
