Work gave me the day off at the last minute so I decided to do some pack training with Ellie on a 5 mile roundtrip up Cuyamaca Peak. Loaded my pack up with 6 2L bottles of water and tested out my snowshoes for the first time, it turned out to be a perfect sunny day with views to the Salton Sea and Villager Peak to the East, to Point Loma and the Coronado Islands to the West.
On the steeper snow close to the summit I practiced throwing myself off the side of the mountain and tumbling for a ways then sliding forwards and upside-down and using my ice axe to self-arrest. When my arms felt like they'd been burnt off I switched to practicing various methods of chopping steps. At the peak Ellie and me found two ladybugs crawling around and we thought how it was weird to find them this high up in the snow, as if they were bagging peaks in the name of all insectdom. They did not carry a flag though.
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