Leon Turnbull Photography

I made a trip up to Ice House Reservoir this weekend for a snowshoe hike. I had 2 goals in mind: first was to catch sunrise on the lake (which, as you can see, I did), and the second was to find a new waterfall (which I also did, but you’ll have to wait to see that one).

I was rather unsure about how much snow would be up there. When you live in the valley, where it is sunny and warm, it is hard to gage how much snow is still in the mountains, and how much of it has already melted. As it turned out, there was still quite a lot of snow up in the mountains and at Ice House Reservoir. I anticipated that I might have to snowshoe in to the lake, and I was correct. You can drive to one end of the lake, but I wanted to get to the other end. I ended up snowshoeing about 9 miles total. At first, I was going to leave my snowshoes in the car. The snow was rock hard, and I didn’t think I would need them, plus I didn’t want to have to carry them 9 miles if I didn’t need to. Well, (fortunately) after hiking only a very short distance down the road, and sinking through the snow a few times, I realized I’d better run back to the car to grab my snowshoes. I’m glad I did that, cuz I definitely needed them this day. But all this running around and stuff made me later than I wanted to be. It was getting close to sunrise and I wasn’t near the lake yet. However, I arrived at a good spot down by the lake just in time to catch the sunrise. It was a beautiful morning.