Last ride of 2014
I took the road up and it was fine--the creek crossings got progressively smaller and more solid frozen on the road up and it was pretty pleasant, actually. I took it fairly easy to not build up too much sweat and to be able to keep moving.
The trail was pretty good in most places--firm and frozen dirt, but dry. There were frozen puddles to contend with (no problem) and frozen streams and springs that were bullet proof and very dicey. I took a fall while walking across one of them and almost went down a frozen waterfall on the west side of the gulch in one of the side canyons! Lots of trees still down; maybe a few more from the last time I was on it at the end of October.
The weather was filtered sunshine and thankfully, dead calm, but was pretty frigid too--my dropper post quit working at the top and I had to manually manipulate the mechanism on the top part of DG. The temperature I started in was about 22 and stayed between about 25 and 18. I added toe-warmers about 8 miles up the road at the view point, but until I started down into the canyon from the 4-way, I was kind of cold. The Mission Creek crossings were very interesting too. The freeze hit when the water was high, 8-12" higher than the current water level when I rode. Thankfully, all that ice was strong enough to walk on, so I only had to find places to step over the still-open running streams. I couldn't ride the crossings like I did in October.
Here are some pictures and short video of my wonderful slip-n-slide.