All done,
Took 18 hours.
The weather was beautiful.
As far as the loop goes, it has a lot of snow on the north side of the pass. You are in snow all the way down to the lake. About 90% of the trail is covered completely.
I would definitely not recommend going over Glen Pass from the north. If you did, you would have to do it from 10-12 am. Any other time and the snow would be too hard or soft.
If going south to north, if you're not heading down by about 11 am it will get very soft and pretty much dangerous.
The loop is doable now but the effort you have to use while going down the 1 1/2 miles of snow takes a good toll on you.
Going up just had a few patches above 10,500' but none were very hard to get over.
It’s hard to believe that I will be doing basically a loop a day for 5 days while doing the JMT.
I started out on the loop at 3:00 am with only 1 ½ hours of sleep. I didn’t really pay to much attention to the amount of calories and liquids I was getting, (thought it was good).
The lack of sleep mixed with the elevation hit me hard while not getting enough nutrition didn’t let me get back up to speed from the half way point all the way back.
Next time I head up there, (before the JMT attempt), I shouldn’t have any problem doing the loop in under 15 hours.
It took 2 ½ hours just to get from the top of Glen to the other side of Rea Lake.
Andrew Skurka talked about how hard it was getting over the passes in the afternoon.
I wish all the luck for those thru-hikers out there.
