Home > Trip Reports > December 17, 2003, Summit Central

December 17, 2003, Summit Central

12/17/03
WA Snoqualmie Pass
8184
21
Posted by MW88888888 on 12/17/03 6:00am
Snow update on SnoQ pass - I was on my way to Yakima this am and decided to bring the skis for a dawn run.  I was very fearful of the rain that fell at the end of the 6" from last night so decided on the groomers to ensure happiness quotient was met with little anxiety.  

As expected, there was a very breakable crust at the base of Central but skinned up to the top and was pleased to see no crust at the summit.  looks like elevation was very kind to Snoq pass - maybe all snow at Stevens.  

Moral of the story for future skiing these next few days until next snow (and pardon the expression) but "stay High for best results".

Very pleasant telemark turns on the groomers as the sun came up.
My goal has been to have these monthly TRs boards be for backcountry trips only. That's why I recently moved Jim's Alpental lifts-running report. This report, however, presents me with a bit of a dilemma, because although the skiing took place entirely within a lift area, it does have some information which could be useful to bc skiers (new snow and crust conditions). Because of this, I am inclined to leave it in this board. But, to help me in my future decision-making, I am interested in finding out what people think about a report such as this one - does it belong in the monthly TRs board, or in Random Tracks?

If in the future I make what you consider to be a bad decision with a report of yours, just let me know (nicely) and I will reconsider. My main goal will always be to have the monthly boards a concentrated source of bc snow information, but I will undoubtedly sometimes make a mistake.

I think my posting posed the same dillema. I'm not all that concerned either way, but my logic for posting of my alpental lifts report here was that I tried to only include some detail on likely BC coverage from what we saw (that glades up higher in the Snoqualmie area might be getting enough coverage to be worthy) rather than a detailed description of what trails I skied on the lifts and how amazing the semi-tracked was and so forth, combined with the fact that I tend to surf only the trip reports for conditions info so that's where I thought to post such info. But if conditions info starts making its way into another forum due to the need to keep TRs only about BC trips, I'll just surf more broadly to see where conditions info has turned up.

Someone's gotta make the rules - I'm happy to follow them once I understand them (there will always be the boundary cases and potential for confusion - eh? studies in categorization of content tend to show that there's little natural agreement across a broad swath of people).

Just for yuks, it occurs to me that there are a few potential factors here:
1) Was it human powered? My trip wasn't, MW88888888's was.
2) Was the ski area open for the season? Seems like folks hitting the ski areas before season opening was unquestioned, but MW8888888 hitting the ski area during the season (but before opening for the day) was.
3) Was it real backcountry, or a lift area that just happens to be closed ? Precedent here suggests that this doesn't matter, though some question is coming up around just "how closed" it needs to be.

It kind of gets down to "what's the goal of this forum?" Is it for reporting of feathers-in-the-cap, or sharing of conditions info, something else, or all of the above?

It's easy to sucker me into a discussion of "information architecture," I'm afraid...

It seems useful to leave it in the trip reports, because it gives an idea of conditions at different elevations at that spot, and it was human-powered too...

A good discussion and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one concerned.  Interestingly, I debated which area to post the info and decided on the TR board because of Jim O's reasons:

1. I did climb the mtn
2. The snow conditions were really what I wanted to share because I had questions about what the rain would have done to the BC snow.
3.  I'm like Jim in that I go to TR reports to see what is happening at different elevations and different locations.  

If I had not climbed the mtn I would not have posted to the TR area but in the Random Tracks.

But, all these reasons aside, I'm just glad Charles The Enforcer has taken pity on a subservient peon like myself and granted me a stay of execution, and left this post where it was.  He is a Good and Kind Lord.

Charles

I, for one, would not be opposed to some 'in bounds' reports during the 'ski season'. That may be because I spend most of my time in the winter riding lifts. So perhaps an 'in bounds' board might be in order? Although skiing Alpental, Stevens, Crystal is a world away from BC it certaintly allows plenty of time to work on your technique which translates to the BC, and with the early season supply of snow we've had  I can't complain! ;D I've been at Stevens 5 times since day before Thanksgiving and this last weekend was a joy to behold with the backside choked in snow both S and S you could ski anything! As always, good work.

Paul

Personally, I check in here primarily to learn about backcountry conditions.  I appreciate reports about lift-serviced skiing which have obvious bearing, but only if they contribute something which is not otherwise on offer.  I am not enthralled by reports which take the form of crowing about what a blast it was yesterday on such-and-such a run at Crystal (or Baker, or wherever) unless the effort is made to correlate this to backcountry conditions.  

In other words, for my purposes the dividing line involves the use to which I can put the included information, not the means by which a slope is accessed.  Always helpful: stability assessments which include angle, elevation, aspect and/or snowpit analysis; weather observations including temperature, sunshine, winds and trends; any and all access issues.  Less helpful: information which assumes a degree of local knowledge (about aspect and elevation, for example, or about place names) or is so nonspecific as to render it useless.  Without value and perhaps dangerous: reports which assume that conditions within avalanche controlled areas or areas which are heavily ski cut all winter can be assumed to adequately represent the actual backcountry.  

The above, highly-opinionated posting should be taken to represent my own personal opinions, nothing more.  Other perspectives are presumed equally valid.  

Enjoy,

Mark (who, surprisingly, skied in an actual ski area last night...and loved it)

I'm glad I hit refresh!  I was about to bring up the same point about "frontcountry" area such as the Alp BC or Crystal north & southback having a different snowpack structure because of skier compaction.

However, I have a slight objection to this statement:

 Without value and perhaps dangerous: reports which assume that conditions within avalanche controlled areas or areas which are heavily ski cut all winter can be assumed to adequately represent the actual backcountry.


Not at all because of its content, this statement is certainly true.  But I do not believe that those kind of assumptions have been made on any of the Trip Reports this year or in any that I can recall reading here.  If anything, I would assert that if there has been an implied assumption in the TRs from ski areas that avalanche conditions on the ski area slopes are different than the actual backcountry.  And that is one reason why so many of us sometimes choose to skin at the area, especially when we are alone.  

Hopefully my slight objection is not too objectionable, and maybe you were really just speaking rhetorically and I misunderstood.  In any case, now that the ski areas are all pretty much 100% open and coverage is good enough away from the areas, my bet is that the TRs will be mostly all "pure"  for the rest of the year.  I think it's mainly a time-of-year thing.

I admit I have been guilty of using local info such as run names and that in general it would be helpful to all to include more info such as elevation & aspect.  I think I will try to include more of that info in the future.  But a TR of any kind is most relevant to people that are going to go to the exact area in the near future, and I would contend that most folks that skin at a ski area often also ski there and would be familiar with the run names.  

Once my back gets better I'll be doing some lift skiing of my own instead of typing all this gibberish.


Reports on snowflakes which have been run over repeatedly has less value to me than what the conditions are in the wild snow.  The whole point of grooming is to ensure uniformity.   It blunts the effects of wind, temperature and precip quite a bit.

Limiting TAY reports to BC trips is silly.  Yes, the BC reports provide oodles of information about snow and avy conditions.  There is more to TAY that that, however.  Info on a secret stash at Crystal or what the snow is like at Alpental are helpful to those who ski BC but also need info that doesn't come straight from the corporate area websites.  Isn't skiing or boarding just as much about getting out with friends and loved ones as the turns themselves?  I guess the real issue is what TAY is really about.  Merely snow conditions?  Merely peace and solitude in the BC?  Or, getting out and celebrating moments of bliss in a world that has more than enough of bad news and suffering. An occassional area report will not turn TAY into something akin to the message boards on Powder Magazine's web site.  Why shut off additional sources of information?
My 2 cents.  

Mark I've read many of your entertaining and informative reports both here and on TT'S, and if I'm not mistaken I've heard a 'crow' or two from you from time to time. If the skiing is great and your havin' a good time 'crow' about it! Like the Ravens at 10,000'  they 'caw,caw,caw' cause they can or they feel like it! On a Summer day the Muir snowfield is anything but BC, or was that PC, with 300-400 people on it, i've had quietier more solitary days at any ski area on a weekday. I did check the home page here and it does say Backcountry  Skiing so perhaps that's the limits Charles wants to put on it. Either way I'll still visit often, BC ski and ride the lifts. 8)
Paul

Hmmm.  An interesting range of perspectives here.  I'd like to reinforce and elaborate on a couple of points.

First, my opinions are only my opinions; I don't expect that they carry more weight than the opinions of others.  Second, I did not, in my earlier post, take any sort of moral stand; I just stated what I find useful in a trip report. Third, I have absolutely nothing against "crowing," provided it is accompanied by a certain amount of useful information (hence the very deliberate wording in my original posting) and, when appropriate, by an equivalent amount of "eating crow," an activity in which I happen to excel.  

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, while I consider this site a valuable public resource, it should be obvious that Turns All Year is not public property.  Its creator and maintainor gets to make the rules, and if we want to use the site it's our responsibility to do as he says (the discerning reader will note that in saying this, I am indeed taking a moral stand).  Therefore, if Charles wants to exclude ski area reports, or include them only under certain circumstances or in support of certain goals, I offer my appreciation for his efforts and try to do as he wishes.  

At the moment, Turns All Year is very clearly defined as a backcountry site.  It may be that this definition is subject to change, based in part on input from its users.  If so, this is an act of generosity on Charles' part.  Either way, we owe him. Thanks Charles.

This soapbox is now available for others' use.  Line forms to the left.

Enjoy,
Mark

I see that there has been some discussion! I'm too tired to digest all of this right now (skied today), but I appreciate all of the input and hope to find time tomorrow to give it a good reading.

Mark, I'm sorry for overreacting in my earlier post.  I think I misunderstood what you were trying to say.  I value and respect your opinions and your wonderful contributions to this site and the backcountry skiing community.

As I may have started to say earlier, I think that these types of reports would, in general, be limited to the time of year we just passed through, where the ski areas are not yet open and the coverage might be questionable away from the clear cut "runs".  And there are a lot of people that do find the information useful.  If not, I wouldn't be seeing those other tracks.

Nice troll off of MW88888888's TR, Charles!!  Wish I could do that :D

Charles, while you've done and outstanding job of organizing and administrating this forum to provide us with the best bc planning tool we've ever had, I think that blue blood in your heritage tends to lean you a bit too far towards the rule making/organizational side of things for my style (which is proly why the forum is such a great tool)  :)

I tend to agree with the more laid back approach to this subject, for the reasons mentioned by Mark and the others above, and for one other:
There's always many more lurkers than posters on a forum.  Why?  Well my guess is at least on if the reasons is fear of recrimination; nobody likes to break a rule and get blasted for it... it's just easier to just be a lurker.
Trouble is, a forum, especially THIS forum, lives and breathes (and dies) due to it's posters.  If all I do is ski in area and I see folks reporting on in area skiing them maybe I'll get up the nerve to register and report "had a great day skiing at Crystal".
Then maybe later, if my report didn't "get me in trouble"  ??? I might try to make some observations to make my next report more valuable to the others, like I see the others doing.  I might even try to hook up with some of the folks doing the bc in hopes of learning more.

So I say let 'em post any kind of ski or boarding trip they want, powered by what ever they want.  They'll learn to give more useful info by following the leads of you old pros.

Which reminds me, speaking of various types of powered skiing (excessive thread drift is a privilege of the elderly, senile skiing crowd, of which I am a member) last week at Whistler I skied with a buddy, Chad, from E WA.  Chad and a friend regularly access bc ski slopes with snowmobiles.  So it seems last year in their extensive snow travels the found their perfect "Stash".   They found this remote powder bowl (that would proly take self powered skiers days to get to) that was crater shaped so once on the rim they just let the sleds go (without a rider) down the slope where the vehicles just stop or stall out at the bottom.  Then Chad and his ski partner ski down along the sled tracks, load up and ride the sleds back up, turn them around and let them go back to the bottom again, yoyoing until they fear running out of gas.  I thought it was a pretty creative use of a machine that I would have never considered buying.

So would we like TR's about snow conditions from knowledgeable sledders?
I would... especially bc skier/sledders like the ones mentioned above.



Yes inbounds reports

some days these are the only ones and some information is better than none.  I found the snow level info in the report above very useful.

Most people posting inbounds reports know what kind of info the board is looking for.  Move the ones that vaguely recap heroics without addressing environmental conditions.

As far as the transferability of information to the BC and avalanche safety issues (the snow compaction factor, etc):  seems to me a "slippery slope" to start making editorial distinctions about the quality of avy info on a public message board like this one (from a liability stand point).  Isn't it that once you cross from buyer beware to taking care that you become beholden to subjective decisions about what constitutes reasonable care?  Not sure ...

With all of the suggestions and opinions, it is a little hard to know where to start. Maybe with an historical perspective: for a number of years, Brent H. ran a "Backcountry Skiing and Snowboarding Trip Reports" site for the Mountaineers. It was the only real source of backcountry conditions info for this area of which I was aware. Brent had announced his intent to turn over operation of the TRs to someone else well in advance, but when April 2001 came around there was no new Mountaineers TRs site. This was very bad timing, occurring right when the ski areas shut down and the NWAC avi forecasts stopped being issued, leaving very few sources for info on backcountry conditions. Someone suggested to me that I add TRs to my site, and because I knew how useful TRs are for backcountry skiers, I decided to do so.

I really liked the format Brent had chosen, because it concentrated all of the TRs from a given month on a single text-only page, allowing for fast browsing, and I continued with that format. An example of this format can be viewed here. After a year and a half of receiving TRs by email and manually posting them myself, though, I decided to set up the TRs as a bulletin board. I hoped this would both make my life easier and result in more backcountry conditions info.

When I was planning how to set up the TRs as a forum, my main goals were to: (1) have pages load as quickly as possible, (2) keep the backcountry info as concentrated and easy to browse as possible. For achieving the first goal, I stripped out as many of the images from the TRs pages as I could (I wanted to do away with smileys altogether, but my "advisors" convinced me to leave a few). In addition, I established the rule of one photo per TR thread.

For achieving the second goal, I went with the monthly boards organization for TRs, the rule that each TR thread has to start with an actual trip report, and a separate board for non-TR topics ("Random Tracks"). In response to contributors' suggestions, along the way I created the "Partners Wanted" board and the set of "Ski Route Photos" boards.

There are a number of existing resources, online and off, for people who want to get conditions info about lift areas and the "frontcountry" accessible from them. These include: snowphone reports from a number of sources, ski area web sites, other web sites which aggregate the daily ski area info, and bulletin boards where people post lift area reports (a good one is SnowboardSeattle.com). I think it is important to remember that there are rarely access or avalanche concerns in lift areas/frontcountry during the operating season, and this often limits the generalizability of reports from such destinations to the backcountry.

A great deal of the Turns-All-Year web site (TRs, Weather Links, Access Links) has been designed and is maintained to be a useful resource for backcountry skiers. Due to the continuing efforts of all of the people who contribute backcountry trip reports here, these TRs have become a very concentrated source of information for backcountry skiers. I have nothing against lift area skiing, have done my share of it in the past, and will do more of it in the future. At this point, however, it is not my main interest, and I don't have either the time or motivation to grow this web site into something bigger than it already is (as has occurred, for example, with the Ttips site and forums).

I believe that keeping this web site focussed on backcountry skiing enables me to do what I need to do to maintain its usefulness. I would like to continue the tradition of reserving the monthly TR boards for trip reports from the backcountry (or which contain substantial information on backcountry conditions, as in the post which started this thread). This will obviously remain a judgement call in many instances, and I will do the best I can to make a good decision in each case. I would, however, be glad to create a new board in "Hot Air" for people to use for the posting of lift area/frontcountry reports which may have useful information, but no substantial backcountry information.

A couple of last points, in response to some of the above discussion. I'm not sure where the references to posters "getting into trouble" and getting "blasted" for posting in the wrong place come from. In the few instances when I have decided to move a report, I have tried to simply state why I did this. My intent is not to get personal, and I don't think that I have done so. My moving a report is not intended to cause shame or fear, simply to maintain these TRs as the best backcountry resource possible, using the guidelines and goals established to do so.

I do not make decisions about whether or not to move a post based on "editorial distinctions about the quality of avy info". The decision is made based on whether or not the post contains information on backcountry conditions, with no judgement whatsoever about the quality of that information. I will never try to publically judge the quality of any of the information contained in a post. The person making the post is solely responsible for the content of their post. The reader of a post is solely responsible for deciding whether and how to use any information which appears in the post. From the Disclaimer:
"It is the personal responsibility of each user of Turns-All-Year Trip Reports to decide whether or how to use any information found here. By viewing, registering with, posting to, or in any other way using Turns-All-Year Trip Reports you are agreeing to the Terms of Use; please read them.

Trip report posts are not edited or altered by anybody other than the author, with three exceptions:
(1) In instances where a post violates the Terms of Use, it may be edited to make it acceptable or it may be deleted. Acceptibility is determined solely by Turns-All-Year Trip Reports administrators;
(2) The title ("topic") of a trip report post may be edited to conform to the standard format of: month day, year, location (eg. July 11, 2002, Camp Muir). This alteration would be made to facilitate browsing of trip report archives, and would not include any other alteration of the author's post;
(3) In instances where a new topic has been posted in the wrong category, it may be moved to an appropriate category, as determined by a Turns-All-Year Trip Reports administrator."

I appreciate all of the thoughtful input people have given in this thread. These TRs have grown quite a bit in the year+ that they have been in the bulletin board format, and it is clear that it was time for a discussion like this.

My 2 cents is that it would never occur to me to use a site like this to glean avy info.  Rather, my primary interest is in learning about routes that I was unaware of, be it front, back, or sideways country.  In this, the board has from time to time excelled, but it seems not to be a stated use or purpose.  Charles' latest TR about the hanging valley is a case in point.

Have a great holiday everyone...

David Lowry, aka Skijorer and Huskyrunnr elsewhere.

Thanks for the clarity, Charles. FWIW, this keeps the TR board focused on what I'm looking for - routes, stories, and conditions that help me in my own BC travels, and that also help me daydream about more of them.

This seems like an appropriate moment to thank you once again for running such a fantastic resource for all of us!

I have not managed to get that much computer time over the holidays, but yesterday finally did set up a new board for non-backcountry skiing reports. It is in the "Hot Air" section and is titled "Lift-accessed Skiing Reports - non-backcountry". Here's the link for it.

I decided that "lift-accessed" might best describe the difference between reports that should go in the new board and those that should go in the traditional backcountry board. It seems like the biggest difference in "lift-accessed" vs "backcountry" snow is the fact that the former typically gets substantial control work (by ski patrol and skier grooming) done on it throughout the winter, whereas the latter does not. Thus, overall snowpack and avi conditions in the lift-accessed areas are not necessarily representative of those in the backcountry. This new board is not not being created because I feel that backcountry skiing is superior to lift-area skiing in some way, or because I feel that lift-area skiers are inferior to backcountry skiers in some way, etc. With the time that I have to put into this web site, my goal is simply to continue improving it as a backcountry skiing resource, because that is what does not seem to be available elsewhere on the Web for this area.

If enough people post lift-accessed reports after they hit the ski areas, however, this new board could become fairly useful for those trying to decide backcountry vs lift area, or which lift area might have the best conditions. So...if you hit the lifts, post a report!



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december-17-2003-summit-central
MW88888888
2003-12-17 14:00:45