After setting our clocks forward the previous night, we met at 9 AM at the Underhill Historical Society and drove one car to the Stevensville trailhead. It was quite warm, in the 40s F, and lightly overcast as we started up around 9:15.The trail looked packed, but we wisely donned snowshoes from the start, which proved necessary as even with them we started occasionally postholing in the very soft snow about halfway up Butler Lodge trail. We reached Butler Lodge around 11, then proceeded up Wampahoofus. One of the usual tiny trickles was a pretty good stream, and one of us nearly went in while crossing it. The cave entrance looked mostly snowed in, so we took the slot through the rock to the left instead. The wind really picked up after reaching the Maple Ridge junction and starting the last stretch to the forehead, probably 40 mph or more, and we really got blown around as we climbed the open rock ridge, where we were clattering across mostly rock and occasionally snow and ice. It was about 32 F when we reached the forehead around 12:30, but we didn’t stay long with the wind. After we passed the Wampahoofus junction on the way down, the trail became a bit hard to follow in spots, but we managed to make only a few minor deviations from it. The snow also got really rotten, the postholing increased, and we started hitting a number of spruce traps. The snow really packed as you went in, making it extremely hard to pull out a snowshoe even if it wasn’t caught under branches. I got caught in the worst one of my life, buried past my shoulders on the uphill side, and had to dig down to where I could reach down and undo my heelstrap to pull my foot out, then lie on my belly reaching way down to extricate the snowshoe. All this was exacerbated by a breaking (but fortunately not fully broken) heel strap. Things got slightly easier after we passed a group of about 4 guys heading up from the Lower Teardrop ski trail and Maple Ridge and could follow their tracks to the Frost junction, and we pretty much stayed on the trail on Frost. The water was pretty high at the stream crossing and some didn’t feel like trying it, so we followed ski tracks that took us down past a cabin to the bridge near the trailhead. We reached the cars around 4. Great day despite the soft snow, and probably my last winter hike as mud season starts. Participants: Julie Cimonetti, Rich Douglass, Jill George, David Hathaway (leader). Photos: all.