Winter so far

The winter hasn't yielded any big adventures for me yet, but there's been plenty of snow to play around in familiar places. So instead of recreating a full trip report from this past spring or summer, I figured I’d get a bit more "bloggy". I'll walk through what early season looks like for me and what I get up to as I rebuild my legs and skills for the big objectives looming on the horizon.

For the eager, the season typically starts in November. Those early days are spent watching forecasts intently, counting snow totals, checking resort cameras, and braving rock sharks, open creeks, and terrible skiing to see how things are shaping up.

Luckily for us, snow started falling and built a solid early-season base. By the time the turkey holiday rolled around, the passes were fully white and ready for exploration. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I met up with some friends at Stevens Pass to test out the snow and our fitness. As expected in November, conditions were variable, but we put up a good couple of slow laps and managed to find some hidden pockets of heavy PNW powder between the hard runnels forming in the open runs and the crusted under-tree snow.

The first ski day is always humbling, especially when touring. Despite tons of summer and fall training, my legs felt like jello afterward, and my turns left a lot to be desired. The stoke was high though (hard for it not to be when there’s snow under your feet).

"The higher the elevation, the better" is the mantra I imagine for the early-season skier. While we’re in short supply of high-elevation spots in Washington, Crystal had been getting plenty of snow, and opened early. I left Stevens behind and drove out to see what they had in store.

To my delight, they had enough snow to start turning Chair 6! December hadn't even shown its face yet, and the notoriously rocky ridgeline had solid coverage. I spent most of my day lapping Powder Bowl, drinking in the surprisingly soft north-facing snow. The face holds a special place in my heart as the first real steep terrain I ever skied, so being able to come back at the start of a season and play around in the chutes was a great confidence boost for the season to come.

In between trips to the resort, I kept up my fitness by lapping the unopened parts of Summit at Snoqualmie. Skiing through the east side has been my favorite way to get in shape for a while, and I’m certainly not alone in that thinking. Every time I go out, there are more and more people enjoying the marginal snow (touring is getting so popular!). It’s a blast to say hi to everyone's ski dogs as they bounce down the slope. It keeps the motivation high and the skin track interesting.

On one of these trips, I took a stroll with a friend into Hidden Valley to scout Mt. Catherine. I've been wanting to explore deeper into this side of the valley after some enjoyable summer days exploring the peaks snow-free.

What we could see was still dubiously filled in, and not looking for an adventure, we decided to stay by the lifts and lap Hyak instead. Coverage was spotty there too, though, and I managed to tumble right into an open hole after hitting an especially thick, wet section of snow. Luckily, there wasn’t any water (it was just a hotspot) so I was able to keep skiing without it completely ruining the day.

The end of December and beginning of January brought in the biggest storm we had seen yet. Some buddies and I took another trip to Crystal to hunt for some lift-accessed powder. Northway opened early, and we heard it was a madhouse (Any Washington skier knows how long the lift line gets on deeper days), so instead, we decided to play the long con in hopes that the Southback rope would drop off of Chair 6.

We took lap after lap there, skiing pretty great snow around Exhibition and Hamburger before starting to hike toward the Throne. We were just in time, the rope had dropped only minutes before we got there, and we shot over toward the King. We must have been in the first dozen people out there and found completely untouched snow off the saddle, so we dropped into Avy Basin, just on the other side of the Throne, and skied the incredible powder there. We hiked a couple more times until it started to track out and our legs were begging to ski something easier.

The next week, our legs were eager to get moving again, so the same crew got back together and ventured out to Snoqualmie Pass again. We had the harebrained idea to head up to the Slot Couloir in hopes of finding a cache of sheltered, dry snow on its prime north aspect. However, the approach quickly changed our hopeful outlook.

We found the worst, nearly unbreakable, tree-bombed-out crust waiting for us on Phantom. After a few hundred feet of trying to boot through it, we decided to bail. Slot wasn’t a guarantee anyways given the mixed avalanche forecast, and since this death crust would be our consolation prize if we bailed at the top, we figured it wasn’t worth the multi-hour sufferfest.

Instead, we descended the small amount of vertical gain we had made in the trees and followed the Snow Lake trail into Source Basin, talking through all of our other options. We decided to cross the divide to Snow Lake and keep searching for north-facing slopes as our best hope for light snow.

We were delighted with our decision. By the time we got to Source Lake, the snow quality had already improved dramatically, and we found at least a foot of beautiful powder as we descended down to Snow Lake. We skied the classic descent and then lines in the trees farther east, reveling in our conservative decision-making.

We turned back in the early afternoon as the sun started to sink lower (can’t wait for those long spring days). There had been plenty of people out in the morning, but by this point, it seemed as though we had the place to ourselves. The basin had mostly cleared of the large AIARE parties and dawn patrollers, but to our surprise, we saw a ski-paraglider coming off of Chair Peak, half-tangled in his lines as he tried to descend. We watched for a bit until he seemed to give up on the sail and take the ski down. We followed the long, icy luge track out and made it back to the car before the sun set.

January quickly dried up, temperatures soared during the day, and the sun shone for weeks on end (a classic fake Washington spring, if not a bit longer than usual). It was sad watching the snow disappear from the trees and thin out in open spots, showing the rocks and base that we’d hoped would already be buried. But we made the best of what we had.

Rather than braving crusty lower elevations in search of decent snow higher up, I spent most of this time lapping the resort with some friends learning how to ski. Pretending it’s spring is a good coping mechanism; stripping down the layers and getting a little sunburned keeps the spirits high and the muscles primed.

Finally, as February approached, the sun broke and precipitation returned all across the Cascades. We saw snow in Seattle and buckets in the mountains. Unfortunately, the long dry spell had created crusts and facets across the snowpack that the new snow fell on, creating worrying avy conditions, especially at high elevations.

I tagged up with some friends and skinned out to Roaring Ridge to ski some nice, protected trees holding on to nearly a foot of new powder. There was hardly anyone else out so we got our pick of fresh lines through the glades, catching light floaty turns while the snow continued to fall and refill the slope.

If there is one thing I learn on the first good snow tour every year it's that my powder skiing skills need some work! After only a couple of laps my legs were burning and struggling to make it through the tight trees at the bottom of the runs. Nothing puts motivation on the table like the feeling of flying through powder though, so I'm here hoping the snow holds and the weak layers begin to heal so we can all get out and tag some big lines in these conditions!