|
For
a while, the Twinway was open, sunny, and dry, and I appreciated the easy
traveling. I stopped to take a picture of Muffin. We quickly reached the
junction with the Zeacliff Trail, which drops steeply down the face of
Zeacliff into Zealand Notch. Beyond this point, we entered the woods
again and had to deal with the narrow ridge of snow in the middle of the
trail. Still, I thought we were making reasonably good time, and we soon
reached the spur trail to Zeacliff Pond.
I
didn't want to take this detour just then, so we elected to continue up
the Twinway toward our goal. It was a wise decision because the going
quickly became more demanding as the snow got deeper and softer, and trail
grew steeper. At one sharp turn up a precipitous section, my left leg postholed up to
my knee, which wasn't all that deep, but none-the-less, I couldn't pull my
foot back out. The soft snow had packed around my foot like concrete; it
wasn't hard to imagine the how it would to be trapped in an avalanche after it stopped
moving. But it took me only a couple of minutes to dig my leg out using my
ski pole to chop and pry snow away from my foot. Just beyond this spot, we came to
a partially-buried ladder climbing up a steep ledge. I managed to get up the
ladder without a problem, but Muffin decided to find another way through the woods on
the other side of the ledge.
After
another couple more steep sections, the trail evened out, but didn't get any
easier. There were a lot of blowdowns up here - several areas were like an
obstacle course between the closely-spaced fallen trees and the six-inch
wide snow ridge with deep posthole-prone snow on either side. And the
trail seemed to go on and on endlessly. Just when I though I must be at
the summit, the route dipped down again only to rise to a new false
summit. It was extremely exhausting climbing. I could have used a nice
long rest stop, but the specter of the impending thunderstorms kept
driving me on - over and under blowdowns and in and out of deep
drifts.
In
a little col between two of the false summits, I saw a spruce grouse in
the woods next to the trail. I was hoping that it might come a little bit
closer, but it showed no signs of moving. I got as close as a I could
without ending up in posthole hell, and took a picture. Of course, all
that showed up in the photo was a small black chickeny-looking shape in the
snow.
Finally
we reached a spot that must have been the top of Mt Zealand as
there were not more humps in front of us. I'd read that the spur path to
the actual summit was poorly marked and easy to miss, so in the deep snow
that still existed up here, we probably wouldn't have noticed the cairn. I
was sick of postholing and climbing over downed trees, and my energy was
pretty much spent. We stopped to take a quick picture, then
turned around and headed back down the way we came. There was little to
see in this area. |
Muffin
on the Twinway near Zeacliff. The flat open area in the vicinity of
Zeacliff was warm and sunny, in sharp contrast to the snowy trail above
and below it. |
 |
