My 2nd snow camping trip of the season, Jason, Matt and I headed up to Bonnie Meadows. Its located a couple miles NW of Boulder Lake on the south side of Mt. Hood. We ended up getting to camp a little later in the day, maybe 2pm-ish. We found a nice camping spot at the south side of the campground located right off the meadow. Which we used to setup the carport in. As we were unpacking gear and getting the fire going, we had a huge gust of wind that took our 100+lb carport with a 10ft x 20ft footprint and toppled it end over end. After that, we achored it down into the snow.
The first night was pretty windy, but we managed to stay warm by the fire.
There wasn't much snow in the campground. Maybe 6-8 inches in some spots as you can see from this picture taken on Saturday.
Saturday, we took a trip over to Camp Windy. Jason was on his snowmobile, Matt in his Jeep and me in the Land Cruiser. We got a couple hundred feet or so away from Camp Windy before the Cruiser started to break through the ice layer of snow making travel difficult. We decided to walk the rest of the way to Camp Windy to Check it out. There was probably about 3ft of snow on the ground there. We could barely see the picnic table.
On the way back from Camp Windy, the Cruiser tires seemed to provide little to no traction on the snow and kept breaking through the ice layer on top. On one corner of the road, I kept plowing off into the cliff and as kept trying to go back and forth. I ended up having to use the winch to keep myself straight. We did end up making it back to camp though.
Getting back into camp was nice. We started another fire to do some coal cooking and stuck up a wind barrier tarp to help keep warm. Our bratwursts cooked over the coals tasted great.
The rest of the day and night, we shot guns, gazed at the amazing amount of stars in the sky, told stories, debated what a calorie was :) and ate some tasty foil cooked chicken with potatoes, onions, butter and olive oil. It turned out to be a pretty good weekend, although we didn't have any snow. It was at least cold enough that we didn't have any rain. Hope to do it again next year!