Back-up plan to Mount Howard from Merritt Lake Trailhead with my buddy. Thought of doing both Mount Mastiff and Howard Loop but we only had about 9 hours, and with our slower pace, we decided to just go for Howard.
Started at around 7 AM with the only car at the TH. There's a section of the road about 0.1 mi to the TH that looked terrible for a low clearance vehicle. I was pretty cautious even with my small SUV.
Trail to Crescent Lake was fairly straightforward, and was mostly dry with the only muddy section on the meadow before crossing Royal Creek and a small section around the switchbacks after Royal Creek.
The meadow before Crescent Lake was full of big fat, juicy and sweet huckleberries. There were a lot of them untouched next to the trail. If we were not short on time, we could have took our own sweet time munching berries 🙂.
We went around Crescent Lake and went up the gully to go above the cliff, which seemed to be a standard route from the previous gps tracks we had. Towards the end of the gully, there's some mild bushwhacking and we did a NW rising traverse towards a beautiful slope with bold fall colors.
After the traverse, there's another scree gully that would take us to a vast open meadow, and the last 300ft or so to the summit was a small boulder field. Our ascent towards the climber's right seemed to be a better option with bigger and more stable boulders.
It was a pretty hot day. Brought 4L and drank all of the water as I was too lazy to filter water from the lake. I could have stashed extra water bottles at the lake but didn't do it in case we decided last minute to do the loop.
There were a couple more vehicles at the trailhead when we came back but we only saw a group of three hikers just before the lake and had the entire area mostly to ourselves.
Stats: 12.66 mi RT, 9:05, Over 4,600ft gain, relaxed pace and quite a few short breaks.
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