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The Patches of Paradise: fall skiing photos from Paradise Glacier, Mount Rainier National Park
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This is a gallery of fall skiing photos. Thumbnail images on this page can be clicked to view the full-sized photos, and lead into a slide show sequence for the gallery. The photos are from a fall skiing backcountry trip to the Paradise Glacier in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington: a skim of new snow made for nice turns on this bluebird day.
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The Patches of Paradise: Paradise Glacier fall skiing, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, September 24, 2006
(Click any of the photos to view large versions)
Mini-panorama of Mount Rainier from near Panorama Point,
with Wilson Glacier, Nisqually Glacier, and summit |
Nisqually Glacier flows from
the summit through its icefall |
Booting on the Paradise
Glacier, with Little Tahoma |
Booting on the Paradise
Glacier, with Anvil Rock |
Skiing patches of new snow
on the Paradise Glacier |
Silas skiing the
Patches of Paradise |
Silas, Paradise Glacier, with
Nisqually Glacier beyond |
Charles skiing the
Patches of Paradise |
Charles |
Silas skiing better coverage
lower on the Paradise Glacier |
Silas |
Photos by Silas Wild and Charles Eldridge
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Backcountry skiing trip reports:
The Patches of Paradise: Paradise Glacier fall skiing, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, September 24, 2006
Shamed by Jim and motivated by last week's excellent report by Pete as well as the forecast for a beautiful day, I signed up to join our esteemed webmaster for a day in Paradise. Charles picked me up at 6:30AM sporting the fine tay shirt featured on the current website frontpage, and we were hiking up the Muir trail by 9:20 (after allowing a group of enthusiastic Singapore business visitors to pose with us and our skis for photos.) We dared to venture off the pavement, which was luckily rangerless, for an occasional ripe blueberry. Several other skiers were encountered along the way, this September skiing is getting popular.
The upper Muir snowfield did not look good from our vantage point so we headed east to the Paradise Glacier along with two Enumclaw HS teachers, tay lurkers with nearly 100 months each. The edge close to the rock ridge held a nice cover of inch deep corn remaining from last week's snowfall and it skied very well for about 1200'. Contrary to the Muir crew of yesterday, the skiing did not inspire us to go for another run.
Company was great, the crystal clear atmosphere provided spectacular views, and we somehow avoided most of the Seahawk game traffic. A nice return to the Northern Hemisphere, and yes Jim, I now have a legitimate September day in the bag.
Silas
If anyone is planning on heading up to this area, properly called "Ron's Edge" I believe, be careful of the well hidden crevasses. There must have been some pretty good wind when the new snow fell, because some crevasses were bridged in a way that made them look just like all of the other new snow patches, and Silas punched a foot through one around 8500 feet (out toward the center of the Paradise Glacier, not right on Ron's Edge).
From our high point Silas and I skied down the fall line, left of the rock island, just to get a look at the Big Crack and see if there would be any reasonable way to continue down to the bottom of the Paradise Glacier. There was not, and in addition the lower glacier was really broken up, had very little new snow, and it looked like there wouldn't be much skiing available in the lower Paradise Glacier area. We were able to traverse back to Ron's Edge without removing skis, and then got some more turns on the lowest Muir snowpatch, which ironically had the most complete coverage of new snow.
Charles |
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