Trip Stats
Trip Report
Tyson, Carl and I planned on skiing the Crooked Couloir. Stability was good and the higher elevation North facing slopes were still holding some powder. We got a late start from the Alpental parking lot, getting on the snow around 8:45am. As we picked our way up the bottom part of the mountain, we followed an extremely windy skin path up through the trees. Eventually I got tired of the numerous micro switchbacks and put in a new skin track. The snow was variable, with the shaded sections still holding some cold smoke, while the sun-exposed snow was already starting to turn to glop.
After a couple of hours, we reached the exit notch. Looking into Thundercreek Basin, we saw a group of tracks coming out of the Crooked Couloir. It was head to tell if they were from a previous day, but the group had exited towards the Snow Lake side rather than come up through the exit notch to the West face of Mount Snoqualmie. As we picked our way along the ridge, the sun continued to pound down. The last time I was up here, there was not nearly as much snow and I was having a hard time telling where I was along the ridge. As we progressed along the ridge, I scampered ahead to try and get a better bearing of where I was. Tyson gave a call out and looped back to see what the problem was. Carl had decided he was finished for the day, so we decided to head back down the mountain.
The ski down the top part was decent, with a slushy layer of snow somewhat covering the hard crust underneath. As we entered the trees, we found some decent stashes of powder, although there wasn’t enough to get more than one or two turns. Towards the bottom, we veered over to the Phantom Slide Path and skied that down. The snow was pretty bad at this point and at the bottom, we decided to ski the Waterfall, which proved to be a bit challenging with the snow conditions. Then it was time for some beers in the parking lot…
Note: I had some moisture on my camera, hence the “mysterious cloud” in all the pictures
