Hiking AB Mountain

Starting out:

 Working as a Mountain Guide is pretty sweet, but the one thing about it is that you don't get many days off...

 

Which means you need to take advantage of the ones you get!

(6/17/13)

 

At 10 AM , I packed myself 3 Liters of water, much more food then I hoped I'd need, a rain jacket, and a bunch of other random oddities. Once I was set to go, I headed out the door!

 

Project of the Day: AB Mountain
 

Elevation 5052 feet (1540 meters)

10 Mile Round Trip

 

The Way Up

 Thanks to my wonderful living situation, I was able to literally walk out the door with my backpack and head towards the trail head.  After a mile of walking through the woods, I arrived at the sign and began my hike up.

 

After about 20 minutes, there's a nice little lookout:

 

 

 Me and Skagway

 

Beautiful day for a hike

 

After a little more walking there a couple of other cool vantage points...

Skagway put in perspective

Little higher up

Click these little ones for the panorama
 

And after some of these sweet views...

 

I was having a blast!

Crossing Tree Line
Crossing tree line was when the hike became more of a scramble.  You can walk it at this point, but it slopes dramatically up, and some of the spots on the trail are actually flowing (snow melt).
 

The false summit in sight! 

Some sweet views began to open up

 

And these flowers started to pop up.

THE SUMMIT

So AB actually has a false summit and a real summit.  That's why they call it AB mountain (it looks like an 'A' and a 'B').

 

So the false summit had some really cool views..

 

Panorama view of the false summit

Absolutely breathtaking

 

Views to the left

 

And after the false summit, I headed up further until I hit SNOW!  Was not really expecting to have to go through it, but I had waterproof boots, a change of socks, and I just picked the line of least resistance...

 

And..

I SUMMITED!
 

Panoramic view of the top

(there's actually more to the left and right of this)

Views on the right


View to the left.
The mountains far in the distance are actually in Canada!
 

Best selfie I could manage.  So stoked to be up there!

 

The Way Down

After taking it all in for about 15 minutes, I began to notice a cloud to the right heading in...

 

So I got my stuff together and got outta there.

 

So much fun navigating around the snow...

And the views didn't hurt either

The snowline ended at that little hump sticking up in the middle of the picture.  I couldn't wait to get there.

My setup for the way down.

And this is why I wanted to get out of there...
 

CLOUDS

Fortunately though, Skagway rarely gets anything more than a slight rain in the summer.  It quickly passed us by...
 

BLUE! (top right)

And then I was both figuratively and literally out of the woods
 

The road home!

and...

MISSION COMPLETE

And that's AB Checked off!  Not sure what I'm gonna try to do next.  I am getting my sport climbing gear sent up to Skagway, so I might start doing some more climbing in the near future...

Rest assured though, I'll put up anything interesting I do up here (eventually)

ENJOY!
CHRIS