On Monday I took a rest day from bouldering in Bishop and strapped on my snowshoes. When Turtle and I set out I didn’t really have a destination in mind. I thought it might be nice to skirt the base of Mt. Tom a bit, but I just figured I’d see where my whims would take me. Upon reaching the moraine between the base of Mt. Tom and the base of Basin Mountain I noticed a black block protruding from the snow near the base Basin Mountain. I recognized this block from several (~5) years ago when I spied it through my friend, Eric Schmidt’s, binoculars. At the time I thought it looked like the size of a box car. I don’t think Eric agreed, nor did anyone else I ever point it out to. Well, I now had an objective.
After much trudging, and pondering the scale of my ‘new’ block, Turtle and I finally huffed our way to the “Ice Cube,” as I’ll refer to it from here on out. Well it wasn’t as big as a box car but it was damn close. Two sides overhang just slightly, one is vertical, and one is slabby. The entire boulder is made up of super clean, super fine grained and polished white granite. If I’d had rock boots I would’ve stayed longer.
Ice Cube
In hopes of someday convincing friends to go up there to boulder I’ll refrain from disclosing how long it took me to get to the Ice Cube or how tired me and Turtle were after our day of snowshoeing. Just know that I will go back at some point, but probably when there’s a little less snow.
Leaving the Ice Cube
3 comments:
Sweet find!!! Boy those paragraphs sure were constructed well.
"rock boots"? did you take some hiking shoes and hammer nails through the soles?
i heard a rumor that there are some killer boulders in the valley between tom and basin mountain, but getting to them involves multiple hours of slogging up and over that moraine you mentioned, with crashpads.
Does Turtle have snow shoes?
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