We started the hike at around 6:30AM. It was a chilly morning and there was snow along the side of the road. We had to put microspikes on pretty much right at the start of the trail. I've hiked Baldy in the snow a couple times, but I've never put on spikes that early, and I've never seen the mountain covered in so much snow. The beginning was not too bad as the snow was hard and compact on the trail. However, the snow cover became a lot thicker right as we started approached the ski hut. With so much snow, the original trail was gone, and people had to climb up to the hut approaching from the southeast. Past the hut, the snow got even thicker. We saw plenty of hikers with crampons and ice axes, so I thought we may have become unprepared. But we were able to manage the last 2 miles to the Baldy summit. It was a slow effort with the deep snow around 3-4′ deep and the steep incline. The trail up to the notch was pretty obvious due to people trudging along before us. But past the notch, the final mile pretty much involved cutting the trail, due to the trail being pretty much nonexistent. We finally made it to the summit at around 9:30am. The top was extremely windy and loose snow was being blown up in the air. With the deep snow, the main summit sign had been covered. The views on the final climb to the summit as well as  on the summit were pretty amazing as all the other surrounding peaks were very visibly covered in deep snow. And magnificent snowy San Gorgonio could be seen far in the east.

We started making our way down, and this was way worse than climbing. Almost the whole way down back to the parking lot, I really felt it on my knees and there were several times where I needed to slide down instead of wrecking my knees attempting to stabilize. The top half of the descent still included deep snow, but the last half included a lot of slippery sloshy snow as the sun exposure had started to melt the snow. We finally made it down to the parking lot before noon, and were comforted to finish another Baldy hike.