Olancha Peak

Well this ended up being an epic physical and emotional soul-suck - thought a 5:30am start would be adequate to get us to the summit by lunch- was not to be, due primarily to the amount of late season snow that fell in the Sierras - the last 2 miles of the PCT leading to the ascent start were snow covered and a post-holing nightmare - if we hadn’t already gone 9 miles we would have turned around, but instead we dealt with literally hundreds of post-holing steps - this made the summit ascent portion of the climb seem easy in comparison - ultimately arrived at the summit at 5! Another 9 hours back to the car (2am!) mostly due to losing the snow "trail" multiple times in the dark and the fact that despite colder temps the post-holing was just as bad going home - ugh - but we got the peak - we had bivies in case, but willed ourselves back to the truck to turn the heater on our feet! Moral of the story for me - I think this would be an easy and fun peak to get late spring after an early snow winter - there would still be plenty of water sources but without all the post-holing (or just bring snowshoes - we didn’t need our crampons or ice axes at all) By the way I was willed through the post-holing section of the PCT by my 15 year old son, who weighs in at 100lbs - he post-holed about 50% less than I did.