Surprise Mountain Trail from Deception Lakes to Surprise Gap - July 23, 2022
I hiked this trail during a short stint on the PCT. After hiking to Deception Lakes from Hope Lake the day before, my hiking partner needed a day to rest with an ankle injury, so I decided to hike this trail solo. This was in late July in 2022, a year with an unusually long spring. I believe it was the coldest and wettest June on record. This explains why there was a large snow drift about 4-8 feet deep and stretching about 1/5th of a mile over the trail. Here's how it went:
The trail is easy to find from Deception Lakes. There is a sign at the junction of the lakes and the PCT that points to Surprise Mountain Trail. It also takes you to the Horse Camp, which just looked like a swamp. The trail starts north of the weathered Horse Camp sign. The first half mile of this trail was wet. It is a well-impacted, uphill hiking trail like the PCT itself, but it was basically acting like a small ditch with water trickling down it from all the snow melt. After that I got to a flatter section that was covered in hard snow, about 4 feet deep but much higher in some places. It covered about 1/5th of a mile by my estimate. I couldn't see the trail at all so I just had to guess its direction and leave good footprints so I could find my way back. I saw some large two-toed ungulate tracks in this snow as well, bigger than a white-tailed deer track, so likely a mule deer or possibly an elk, but probably not my favorite two-toed ungulate: the giraffe. Regardless, I didn't see any live animals.
I managed to find the trail at the end of the snow and continued up Surprise Gap. This section of the trail gets dry quickly, and by dry I mean arid. It was like a completely different biome. It reminded me of southern California mountain trails: dry shrubs and sagebrush-type stuff. I was glad I wore long pants because the hard, dry branches on the bushes at my shins would have cut me up. This section ended quickly at the glacier on Surprise Gap. This glacier was maybe only 10 feet deep, and kind of steep. I hiked up to the crest and looked out over the basin below. I could see Glacier Lake and the bit of the PCT I hiked the day before. I couldn't see any hikers through my monocular after scanning the length of the trail, so I decided to scream, sing, and yodel out over the valley. The echo was amazing. I then started to go up the trail to Surprise Mountain, but quickly decided it was too dangerous without snow gear on my boots or an ice axe. I would have had to follow the trail across snow that was at a 25° grade by my estimate (could be way off, but it was visibly quite steep). So I turned around and boot-skied back down to the glacier and back to camp.
The whole trip took me less than 2 hours: an hour to the gap, 15 minutes of echoing, and less than 45 minutes back down. It would probably take less with less snow, and you could make it all the way to the top of the peak. There were bugs, but not as bad as at the lake. I would highly recommend this hike to anyone camping at Deception Lakes if they have a couple hours to spare at the end of one day or the beginning of another. It's definitely an option hike for a thru-hiker on the PCT. If you're going N to S, the view from atop Surprise Gap might tempt you to sled down the glacier to Glacier Lake below to save 7 miles (don't try that). Altogether it was a really nice solo hike with lots of solitude and character. 4.5/5.
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