The adventure started with the drive over to the trailhead. I wasn’t even to the trailhead yet and there was snow on the side of the road everywhere. I arrived early, thinking nobody else is going to want to hike this mountain with snow all over it.

To my surprise everyone else was excited to try and do this hike, not knowing how far we would make it. We started the hike at 7 AM. It was cold but no snow for the first ½ mile. Started getting thicker and thicker, and the snow was dry and very fluffy. You couldn’t even make a snowball.

We finally came up a huge rut across the trail so that we had to venture off trail up the snow. This was quite the scramble, but after some time we connected to the trail above us.

We took a short break to catch our breath and take in the scenery. It was spectacular! Took a couple of photos. We had to take a selfie, because no one else was on the trail this day.

We continued up the old Jeep trail that is in bad need of repair. The snow at this time was getting thicker and making it more difficult, like walking in thick sand. We reached the newer road, where someone had driven up, making it much easier to make our way up.

This ended a little short of the gate to the tower. We took another break to take in the scenery, where we could see Bartlett Lake. It was a little cold at this time. We started going up the last stretch up toward the tower. The snow was getting very thick. We would sink down about a foot at this time, but it was less than a mile, so we pushed on.

Before we got up to the towers we could hear a lot of loud clanking, which we figured out to be sheets of ice falling down from the towers. When we got to the top, we ate lunch and admired the views of Four Peaks, Bartlett Lake, Roosevelt Lake and more.

The hike down was much easier. It was like walking on the moon. We reached the gate fairly quickly. The FR626 road was a little slippery at this time going down. We reached FR27, the old Jeep trail. It was going to get a little harder again, do to no tire tracks going down the Jeep trail.

We made our way down fairly quickly compared coming up. We got to the point where we came up from our off-trail deviation to get past the rut. We found an easier way down than the way up, but there was a little butt scooting at the end of this to get down safely.

We took a picture of the rut to remember this by. After this point the snow was really starting to melt a lot, which surprised me because it wasn’t that warm. We were sliding around a lot by this time. Toward the end there was no snow where there were lots going up. We all reached our cars at Slate Creek.

It felt good to be done. I forgot to mention that there were 3 of us on the hike. I would personally like to thank both Debbie and Joyce for making this the best Mt. Ord hike I have ever done, and doing it where most people would have not gone when they saw that much snow.

Thanks for all the pictures to use in this report, very hard to narrow down. I wanted to use them all.