Chinook Pass

Tim and I decided to hit Chinook Pass again. I picked up my new Blizzard Titan 8.2 from Pro Ski and let Tim use my AK Launchers, since he broke his bindings at Chinook last Sunday. We arrived around 10am and parked just past the footbridge on the Yakima side. There was already a bootpack and a couple of cars parked.

We skinned up a couple of hundred feet and then skied down from there. The skiing was nice and we decided to follow a tight riverbed down another couple of hundred vertical feet. We reached the bottom, threw on our skins and started our ascent. We stayed looker's left on our way up, since we wanted to check out the accessibility of some nearby peaks. There looked to be a couple of saddles connecting Naches to the other peaks, but it looked a little far for what we had in mind that day, so we skinned behind Naches and booted across 10 yards of rocks and came out on the southeast ridge of Naches.

From there we made a descent of the bowl and then traversed below Naches and skied down to the car. I dug out the beers I had stashed before we took off and we enjoyed a couple of cold ones and soaked up the sun.