Mt. Willey

The Willey Range consists of Mts. Tom, Field and Willey. Last winter, Sean and I hiked Mts. Tom and Field, but the trail over to Mt. Willey wasn't packed down, so we decided we would hike it another day. That day was Saturday, August 19! It was a perfect day for hiking, sunny and about 65 degrees to start. We began the hike on the Kedron Flume Trail and then took the Willey Range Trail to the summit, totaling 5.4 miles RT. 

Lunch!

Start of the hike

Sean!

View from the Kedron Flume

Kedrom Flume... not very impressive this time of year!

1.3 miles down, 4.1 miles to go!

Camouflage 

The entire hike was pretty easy/moderate until we reached the stairs! That was a very steep section that would have been very difficult without them. Thank you to the trail workers who put them in! We met a few people who said the trail just keeps getting steeper after the stairs, but was close to the summit. At least we had that to look forward to! About 20 minutes later we arrived at the summit. 

Probably would not have made it up this section without the stairs

The stairs heading up to the summit

Messy trail at the base of the stairs

I thought the stairs were awesome!

Since we are so healthy, we bought some fudge at the Willey House's gift shop to have as a treat for making to the summit! It was delicious. After conversation with some other hikers and trying to figure out which peaks were which, we started getting chilly because of the breeze and decided to start our hike back down. 

At the summit! Sean's scoping out a little spot to eat lunch

View of the Southern Presidential's

Heading back down! It was a little more tricky than going up

Overall, this was a really fun hike, but would be difficult with a dog or in bad weather/ ice. When we did out Presi traverse, we met a couple of guys who hiked this trail at night with headlamps! Probably not the smartest idea! It's also a nice hike if you don't want to be out all day, our total hiking time was about 4.5 hours.