Mission Ridge powder/sun

Made the call the hit Mission Ridge after seeing a little storm hit there harder and colder than the west side of the mountains. The colder part is typical, the harder is very unusual. Three-hour drive, but worth it...this time.

Union Peak area

Went to the Union Peak area East of Stevens Pass. Views were amazing, but we totally fucked up the route and didn't get much good skiing. Better luck next time. At least I really earned the $10 in McDonald's I ate.

Quick edit of 2 recent trips

Quick and dirty edit of a couple recent trips. Yodelin is near Stevens Pass, and Bullion is near Crystal Mountain. Supposed to be full-on sun this weekend, so more to come.

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.