False White

Trailhead: Saddlebag lake Rd

Elevation: 12002 ft

Route: East face

Difficulty: Easy spring ski

Aspect: East

Did Tioga Pass and/or Saddlebag lake road just open but there's still a lot of snow in the high country? Are you feeling a little out of shape or injured but you still want to feel like you're a real mountaineer? Are you looking for corn snow and want to take your dog with you? Maybe False White just outside of Tuolumne Meadows is the mountain for you.

Well they said full recovery from hip FAI repair would take a year and I didn't believe them but here I am 11 months later with my first Sierra peak since then, so I guess they were right all along! And even still - this mountain I had to do on skis, which are perhaps the easiest form of mountain travel on the joints, and it's a smallish one at 12k, and my pack was light. But after many months of skiing bunny slopes in the resort, doing XC ski laps on the forest roads, and endless physical therapy cycles I'm pretty darn pleased to have had the pleasure to ski False White.

The road to Saddlebag lake had just opened about a week ago, and with the slim snowpack this year (2021) we knew we needed a high trailhead to find the snow that lingered. I had just discovered the Caltopo Pro has a feature where you can overlay realtime satellite data onto its maps and by using this we figured out that of all the peaks in the Tioga region the east face of False White seemed to be holding the most snow. At the trailhead we met a man from Monterrey who was going for true White Mountain - but it looked a little bony for our tastes. Our route started out the same so we followed behind him for a while.

The trickiest part of the day seemed to be crossing the creek that parallels the trail out of the campground on the road to saddle bag lake. We were able to follow the trail up about 2/3 of a mile before we heard hooting and howling - our friend had found a bridge! You won't have the benefit of a scout going ahead of you though, so you can see where we crossed on the linked CalTopo. A second creek still had a pretty frightening snow bridge that went OK on skis but I'd stay off of it if I didn't have flotation of some sort.

After the creek crossing we followed a series of ridges and gullies south to the broad east face of the peak. I was listening to "A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World" on audio which I highly recommend - it's a post-apocalyptic tale but with endearing characters and a genuinely hopeful tone. Eventually we climbed high onto the face before making a very scenic but generally non-scary traverse southward under a series of gendarmes on the ridge until we found a chute leading onto the summit plateau. From the summit we could see Conness, Tuolumne meadows, and even Ritter and Banner peak poking up from near Mammoth lakes.

To descend we essentially retraced our steps, achieving about 3 nice corn turns down from the summit ridge before skiing mostly wind/sun altered snow and mashed potatoes. We didn't attempt to find the creek crossing again and instead just forded the creek where it came closer to our parking spot. We celebrated at the Mono Cone in Lee Vining - I highly recommend their "Freezes" which are ice cream blended with soda!

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