| Summary | None |
| Owner | James Huang |
| Creation Date | 2013-03-02 22:21:44 UTC-0500 |
| Description | 3/2/13. Flume Slide. Kyle and James.
We parked at the Basin parking lot at 8:30am and walked south along the recreational path until we found the shortcut to Liberty Spring Trail. It was broken out enough for us to follow, otherwise I think it would have been difficult. At 9:30, we hit the junction of Liberty Spring and Flume Slide Trail, and turned right to follow Flume Slide Trail. The information online says to follow the trail for 2.5 miles until you will see the actual slide. We hiked for 2 hours and what we thought was 2.5 miles and believed we passed the slide so we decided to go off trail and find it. Of course we ended up cutting left off the trail too early and had to bushwack in thigh deep snow for 1.5 hours before we came to the base of the slide. Once we finally got onto the slide, things finally started looking up for us. The slide itself had very nice views of Mount Liberty, no one else was on it, and climbing up had a semi mountaineering feel to it. It was great. Next time though, we decided we would not do it after recent snowfall. We were trudging through thigh deep snow the entire climb. Right before we topped out we found ourselves in a patch of trees in the middle of the slide and the snow went from waist deep to chest deep. This part of the climb was very frustrating because not only was the snow very deep, the slide was very steep. It was very difficult to make any sort of progress. We reached the summit at 3:30pm, 7 hours after we started. Too exhausted to bag Liberty, we decided to hike down FLume Slide Trail. The trail is very steep for about 1 mile from the summit, which made it great to sled down. We made it back to the car at 6:30pm, 4 hours quicker than it took us to ascend. |