Pear Lake Hut
Peerless Pear Lake
Jonathan Ho, Anna Broome, Catherine Rocchi, Paul Summers
Location: Pear Lake, CA
Date: Jan 16-19 2020
Ah the crisp, fresh air of the world before, a time that was Jan 2020. With some openings in Jon’s reservation, Catherine, Anna and I (Paul Summers) jumped on the opportunity to spend a long weekend living in a small cabin with 8 strangers, enjoying the beauty of the Southern Sierra with a modest January snow pack.
Anna and I left late Thursday to camp near the trailhead, hoping to make the most of Friday with some skiing after the ski into the hut. However, due to some minor snowplow breakdowns Friday morning, Anna and I spent most of the daylight hours sitting at a road closure point. Once the road finally opened, we raced up the road to the trailhead well after 3 PM. Once we got packed and on our way, we ended up skiing almost entirely in the dark, arriving at 9pm (not recommended friends). Thankfully the trail is marked with reflective blazes, and not overly complicated to navigate. This was my first tour trying to pull a ski pulk, which may have hindered our speed on the way in. The steepness of the pear lake approach is also more than is easily handled with a pulk, I wouldn’t recommend it as the ideal place to learn how to ski with a pulk.
The hut was a welcome site at 9pm for Anna and I as we were tired, sweaty, and cold from the night. The hut was a much needed dry, heated retreat for us to make our late dinner and then head to sleep on the hut bunk beds. The next day, we went for a short tour sizing up the snow conditions before returning to meet our friends, Jon and Catherine, coming in that afternoon. We were treated to a fairly typical January snowpack filled with wind scour and shallow rocks near ridges. We also noticed a number of odd woomphs we could never assign to a particular buried layer, which led our tour towards more conservative lines before heading home.
Despite my bringing a pulk sled, Jon and Catherine arrived that day with significantly better food, namely bacon and pancakes. We learned that the hut has a number of amenities, including a pasta maker! Future trips should dream big on gourmet cuisine. Over a shared dinner of tacos, our fellow hut mates, a larger group of middle aged men, told us of their sledding adventures that day. Though I still prefer ski touring over snowshoeing and sledding, this group made a convincing argument for the sled life.
The following day, we were treated to a lovely long tour through the tablelands east of the hut with mixed conditions, skiing with the telemarking hut host. This wandering tour again aimed to avoid the pesky woomphing issue we’d observed, and kept us on low angle terrain for most of the day. We enjoyed a beautiful view from Tableland Pass before scooting our way back down to the hut for another dinner of munchies, music, and merriment.
Sunday sadly marked our last day, and we skied out that morning. The net downhill route to the car proved far trickier with a pulk, and I rolled the sled more than a few times! I was happy to have the support of my friends to help pick up the pieces after the larger mishaps. Once we made it back to the cars around noon, it was an easy drive back to campus. The only hiccup was the all concerned messages I’d missed from my family after being AWOL all weekend, remember to leave a trip plan with your mom!
