Flett Glacier

Skied this fun Rainier glacier with a friend on Friday. Awesome ski. Was lucky enough to have someone on a mountain across the way snap a couple photos of us. We're two dots on the top left of the glacier in the first photo, and down much lower in the second.

Interglacier: At long last, some corn

Corn snow forms when the surface melts and freezes repeatedly. This forms fragile, tiny nodules of ice that ski like absolute magic. Not as good as powder, but sometimes close. After a long wait, we finally found some Sunday on Interglacier.

The hike to the foot of the glacier is something like 3 miles, but feels like more with all the boulder-hopping and weird snow conditions. A lot like the Colchuck Glacier trip.

I've done this trip many times, and it's almost always exhausting (12 miles round trip), but worth it for the long, steepish north-facing run. I bonked hard about 500 vertical feet short of the top of the glacier (Steamboat Prow), and carved out a little recliner in the snow and took in the view while waiting for Jesse to ski down the top part.

From there down, the skiing was fantastic. We traded big, fast turns in hero snow, stopping only to catch our breath now and then.

Looking at this video, I realized I'm getting a little lazy with the footage: A lot of jarring around and poor angles. Will pay closer attention next weekend.

Silent movie: Chair Peak

Went up to the Chair Peak area at the north end of the Alpental Valley this morning. The very warm temps (well, 70s) made for very mushy snow, difficult to skin and ski so we bailed on a planned traverse out to Malekwa Lake and Kaleetan Peak. Basically, the top 4-6 inches of snow pack sheared off at the slightest prompting, making for some interesting slow-motion slides. While this isn't dangerous in the right situation, it's not something you'd want to deal with while traversing above cliffs, which is what we would have had to do.

Instead we noodled around the east aspect of Chair Peak and then down to Snow Lake. Inevitably, the best part was the after-ski parking lot session in Lot 4. Some things never change. Couldn't match up any music just right for this, so we're going Chaplin style. We're off the Interglacier tomorrow, so more to come!

Rites of spring cont.: Muir slog

Jesse (not Amy's cousin) and I trudged up Muir under beautiful, sunny skies and mostly calm winds Saturday. While the snow on the skin up looked like it would make for great skiing, things got marginal below about 8,400 feet, where we jumped into the Nisqually chute. Deep, sticky, syrupy mush greeted us there. In several spots, you could point directly down the fall line and still barely move if you weren't in anyone's tracks. Still, a great day in the mountains and at least the beer/sausage/chips afterwards were well earned.

Spring it on

Since my last post, we spent several weeks doing the usual early spring thing: Laps on the steeper in-bounds terrain at Alpental interrupted by frequent hanging out in the parking lot sessions.

With all the lifts in the state closed, it's time to start touring. Based on glowing trip reports from the week prior, I headed Saturday to Colchuck Glacier, which sits between Dragontail and Colchuck peaks. This is part of the Stuart range, southwest of Leavenworth. The trip is actually a lot like Interglacier: The trail is in difficult condition by the time the road melts out, and the skin up the glacier feels never-ending, but then you ski down and forget about all that.

A combination of early-season legs and tough trail conditions made this a very long day: 14 hours door-to-door. The drive is about 2 hours, but the slogging below the lake seen in the photo and video where what took the most time. There was tons of rotten snow that you'd break through up to your thighs, so you'd switch to skis/skins only to find a long patch of dry trail.

However, this is a truly spectacular area and is well worth the effort.

Not ready to ski only once a week, I headed up to Alpental (closed) for a quick lap. There's still a ton of snow, but it's not consolidate enough away from the groomed trails to be much to ski. Felt like a foot or two of death mush. Thankfully, they'd run a groomer about halfway down the mountain almost to the parking lot, so I follow that trail all the way down.

Feels great to be skinning again.

I'll follow the sun

With rain at Snoqualmie Pass, we headed east to Blewett Pass to get some sun and decent snow. And it actually worked. Blewett is between our house and Leavenworth (very roughly) and is at about 4,000 feet. The terrain is underwhelming, but the weather is better and the access is easy. The fauna and geology are noticably continental here, as opposed to Northwest Coastal. Lodgepole pine, praire meadows and much drier conditions are the norm. Good place to avoid the rain.

We skiied the south aspect of Diamond Head, a peak just southeast of the pass. Very fun day with excellent snow conditions.

The Spring Routine

Spring made sort of an appearence this weekend after a very cold (very happy!) March. Snoqualmie Pass received about 10 feet of snow in March alone, and it snowed heavily all of last week.

On Saturday, it finally began to warm up, but lucky for me it was slow enough to get some leftover powder. I've fallen into a bit of a habit when skiing inbounds in the spring, one that many others seem to share. From the top of the upper lift, there's a route you can take that stays in the shade most of the day, protecting the snow from the strong spring sun. It was also a good excuse to break out the camera again. The black thing in the frame is the visor of my helmet. It's a bit annoying, but the camera angle is much better.

I love powder

Maybe it's obvious, but maybe not. Skiing powder is fun for a lot of reasons, but here's mine: It allows you to do almost anything you're imagination and bravery can conjure in skiing, especially with the help of the new generation of powder skis. Jump off that 10 foot cliff? Sure. Charge through steep, treed slopes? Why not? Hover effortlessly, gently over mellow slopes? Ok.

Powder smooths everything out and creates a blanker canvas (playing off of natural features is a big part of the fun. You don't want a completely blank canvas). Skiing powder is simply the most fun, rewarding thing I do in the outdoors. Days like today will stick with me for months, remembered at summer cookouts and relived in late spring liftlines: "Where you there that Wednesday in March? That smile tells me all I need to know."

Today was one of those days.

Finally: Usable helmet camera footage

After lots of tweaking, I finally some decent helmet camera footage. Still more work to do (need a goggle mount so I can do the side view), but there's progress.

Took advantage of a surprisingly sunny day to try the setup. Stayed on tame terrain due to some terrible snow conditions on the upper mountain, but you get the idea. The shakiness can be minimized, but not eliminated on hardpack snow, but powder should be smmmmooootttthhhh. Much better stuff to come!

Skinning Hyak

Hyak is the smallest of the Snoqualmie Pass ski areas, even more so now after a large landslide knocked two lift towers and destroyed half of the area's main run. In a weird way, this was a good thing because there's now an easily accessible "backcountry" (insert eye roll) area that Amy feels really comfortable on.

We took advantage of the foot or so of snow that fell this week and skinned up Hyak and had some great powder turns. Felt great to be back on some new snow.

Whistler

The last month has been a blur. Jury duty, then holidays and the best stretch of skiing I've ever had. And then it rained. A lot. 10 inches or more in a day and half at Snoqualmie Pass. Since then there's been very little new snow. Mostly cold and somewhat sunny.

So we were very wary of the conditions we'd find in Whistler, where we were very generously invited by Jerill and Janet. Whistler-Blackcomb is about 4 1/2 hours north of home in British Columbia's Coast Range. The drive up was under blue skies and tremendous views. The sound north of Vancouver is spectacular, with huge mountains rising out of the sea.

Whistler itself is a gigantic resort set on two mountains connected only by an amazing new gondola, the Peak to Peak. Check out the maps found here. The number of actual trails doesn't mean as much in the West because so much of the terrain is wide open and varies depending on the line you decide to take.

We had sunny and cold weather with marginal snow (mostly stayed on groomers), but spectacular views. There are just so many options in-bounds and out up there. There was some awesome-looking hike-to terrain, but we played it conservative this time. We got to ski the downhill course the men will ski in the Olympics next year.

Had great trip with great people that we hope to do again...soon.

The first clip below was taken from the Roundhouse, which is something like 3/4 of the way up Whistler mountain. The second is from the Peak to Peak gondola. It was just too damn cold to take out the camera that much. Not charging the battery before I left didn't help either.

Helmet cam update: I think I finally have it figured out after taking three or four videos of either my feet or the snow 2 inches in front of my ski tips that induced immediate motion sickness. Testing will occur this weekend.