Mt. Hodges attempt

With such beautiful weather I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to get in a winter walk up Mt. Hodges, and get to see the view and take photos of everywhere carpeted in snow. We set off in the morning, having packed crampons and ice axes, guessing that it would probably be quite icy higher up on the windswept slopes. For a change we also decided to head up the back of Hodges, a slightly longer route, but not so steep. This ended up causing us a few issues!

The back of Hodges is quite undulating, and therefore the  snow had settled into all the hollows, and had formed some quite deep drifts. This was difficult to walk through, and unfortunately we didn’t have our snow shoes having thought it would be icy instead. Some of the short, steeper sections of scree had iced up too, and then had a covering of snow, making the conditions quite unstable and difficult to walk up. After almost 3 hrs we had got up to the flats behind Mt Hodges and had our lunch. We still had quite a bit of climbing and potentially more deep snow to go, and with the days being fairly short at this time of the year we decided not to carry on. I think next time I shall go up by the normal route, and possibly take snow shoes too. It was a lovely walk though, and we all had good fun which is the main thing so we weren’t too disappointed.