June 14, 2008, Cowboy Mountain
6/14/08
WA Stevens Pass
1247
1
Short hike up the Stevens area today, saw about a dozen others. Nice sun and smooth corn. Surprised to find less snow than at Snoqualmie pass. Pics coming later.
Short hike? As the newb in the group, I'd like to point out it was a very long hard hike, worthy of notation in the annuls of history. I only realized later that it was two hours and forty five minutes from leaving the car to returning to the bottom, and at least 30-45 minutes of that was my partners waiting for me to catch up. Perhaps I need a little more practice with the technique of using these funny skin things. Rolling uphill to engage the edge in a traverse == bad.
We hiked up about halfway through groom, but the sun was mucking it up quickly. We did the second half along the ridge in the trees, where a very thick layer of surface hoar played havoc with my kick turns. We bootpacked up the last few hundred feet, to crest Cowboy Mountain with a beautiful view.
The trip down was nice wet snow, pleasant for mid-June. In the steeper sections we set off a number of shallow wet sluffs which crawled down the mountain incredibly slowly, but travelled much further than I would have expected.
This was a great quick outing, but I don't think it'll be skiable much longer. Alpental had a much better base when I was there Thursday.
All my photos are available at this page although I warn that I've spent zero time organizing the photos and they're really just thrown up there at high res.
** Update - I made a couple of thumbnails, so you can see the best couple of shots without having to download 120 megs of photos:
We hiked up about halfway through groom, but the sun was mucking it up quickly. We did the second half along the ridge in the trees, where a very thick layer of surface hoar played havoc with my kick turns. We bootpacked up the last few hundred feet, to crest Cowboy Mountain with a beautiful view.
The trip down was nice wet snow, pleasant for mid-June. In the steeper sections we set off a number of shallow wet sluffs which crawled down the mountain incredibly slowly, but travelled much further than I would have expected.
This was a great quick outing, but I don't think it'll be skiable much longer. Alpental had a much better base when I was there Thursday.
All my photos are available at this page although I warn that I've spent zero time organizing the photos and they're really just thrown up there at high res.
** Update - I made a couple of thumbnails, so you can see the best couple of shots without having to download 120 megs of photos:
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