After completing our bundle-up, we continued upwards. The snow up here was now windblown and hard, and we could easily crunch along the surface without sinking it. We crossed the first of many bumps and false summits along Osgood Ridge, which we could now see curving up and to the left of us, culminating with the bright sunlit peak of Mount Madison. We still had a fairly long way to climb.
The wind did indeed increase as we ascended. It was coming at us pretty much head-on, and it added a noticeable extra bit of effort to our climb. There were many areas of ridgeline that were wind-scoured down to angular boulders, and in these areas it was awkward to navigate through them on snowshoes. As a result, we often made little detours away from the trail in order to capitalize on sections that were smoothly filled-in with snow.
Presently we arrived at the small col containing the junction with the Daniel Webster Scout trail. We'd be taking this trail on the way down, in order to form a more interesting loop hike. We were running low on energy again, so we stopped for a quick lunch break.
Continuing on into increasing wind, we approached a steep pitch not far from the summit. Looking at its orientation from a distance, I surmised that it was steep enough and angle such that it would be in the wind's shadow. Sure enough, as we approached the base of the slope, the wind died to almost nothing, giving us a welcome few moments to adjust our clothes and breathe a bit without a face mask.
We fixed all of our cold weather gear back on, mentally did a "1-2-3-go", and stepped into the force of the wind above our little sheltered pocket. It was only a few tens of yards to the summit from here, but we were now fully exposed to the northwest wind's force, and we did not dally for long at the summit.
With both gravity and wind now helping us, we made it back down the ridge to the Daniel Webster cutoff in just a few tens of minutes. We then started following the intermittent cairns of that trail, which led down the north east slope of Osgoode ridge, away from its crest. With the ice and snow plastered everywhere, it was hard to spot signs of the trail. Looking for the snowy towers of the cairns proved to be the best bet.
The angle of the upper part of the Daniel Webster Scout trail is quite steep, and we soon discovered that the wind had scoured the surface of this steep slope into a very hard and slippery layer of snow, interspersed with ice-encrusted slabs of rock. In places we deliberately went off trail in order to circumnavigate slightly trickier or steeper spots. In fact, we felt it dicey enough to switch into crampons at one point, although that turned out to be a bad idea as we quickly discovered that this hard crust often covered 4-foot deep pockets of snow that would not hold one's weight underneath only a boot. Switching back into snowshoes, we gingerly made our way down the slippery hard surface to treeline, where things became powdery and soft again.
