Trip Stats
Trip Report
The pickings were slim for getting some August turns, so we settled on familiar territory: Mount Rainier. Arriving at the parking lot at 8am, we found hordes of people getting ready to hit the trail. Tim and I kept a leisurely pace up the trail, stopping a couple of times to hydrate and eat. At around 8,000ft, we started to encounter snow and we crossed over onto the Paradise Glacier. There were some large crevasses opening up, but the skin up was straightforward.
We opted to head to camp Muir, even though we knew the skiing would be horrible on the snowfield. At Muir, the wind was whipping and kicking up a lot of dust, making our break at the camp a bit uncomfortable. Skiing down from Muir proved interesting. I almost convinced myself that the inverse moguls, or gigantic sun cups, made for some good skiing. We occasionally had to dodge chunks of rock and I was worried that I would crash in front of the long line of people hiking up to Muir.
Once we got on the Paradise Glacier, the skiing was better. The snow was still scared, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the snowfield. We had to ski with caution, avoiding the crevasses. The hike down proved the most difficult part of the trip as we were forced to say “Yes, you can ski up there†at least 30 different times…
