Overnight trip with camp on the summit of Surprise Mountain from 1.19-20 2026.
ROAD to the trailhead was blocked by a giant snowpile about 0.3 miles from the regular trailhead, but there was a large parking area before the closure. The road there was fine for a regular car.
TRAIL: There was ice in the parking area, so we just threw on spikes from the get go. The road walk had patchy coverage, but the trail quickly became consistent compact snow and ice.
We were able to make it to Surprise Lake in microspikes. The snow was 95% supportive and 5% surprise postholing. The boot-path was pretty established for the first few miles, but became less defined as we got closer to Surprise Lake. We picked up old ski/snowshoe tracks here and there, but didn't rely on them for navigation. There were a couple of short bare spots/water crossings to deal with, but surprisingly no major blowdowns.
The log crossing of Surprise Creek (about 1.5 miles in from the parking area) was snow-covered, but the snow was supportive enough that we were able to cross.
Past Surprise Lake, we put on snowshoes as we no longer had any tracks to follow. We pretty much followed the path of the PCT to the open bowl below Surprise Gap. We cut straight up to the gap, skirting around a large swathe of avalanche debris that looked like it had come down relatively recently.
From Surprise Gap, a little bit of initially steep snowshoeing got us up and on our way to wrap around to the gentle southern flanks of Surprise Mountain. We made our way to the summit, where we set up camp with a view.
The weather was unseasonably warm, sunny and dead calm and we basked in the sun until sunset. We had a view straight north out of our tent door, and I spent the night intermittently checking for aurora activity. I didn't see anything great and ended up passing out for real around 1 a.m. Apparently the light show really took off after that at around 3 a.m., which was a bummer for me. 😆
The winds picked up quite a bit in the early hours of the morn. Sunrise was a little more cloudy and subdued than we had hoped for, but it was still a beautiful day. We packed up camp and headed back down more-or-less the way we came, keeping snowshoes on until right after the log crossing where we switched back to spikes. It took us half the time to get back to the car as it had taken us to trudge up!
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