December 22, 2008, Hyak

Despite all the awesome skiing reported out our backdoors, we decided to brave the highways and head for a distant locale with more vertical skiing.   Silver Fir was suggested, but when we found the lift operating, we decided to drive further on to Hyak.   Lucky for us, two guys had just begun setting a skin track, so we followed them to the top of the lift and had the pristine run to ourselves when they decided to head for Mt Catherine.  Skiing was fast on 4-16" fresh, the thin snow over a crust and the deeper on a firm base, no rocks to take a bite of our skis. 

We found half a dozen more enthusiasts heading up on our second run, and another half dozen on the third.   We then considered touring elsewhere but alder was showing in all the destinations we reviewed.   There were a few skiers at Alpental, it looked good.  We heard that Silver Fir closed shortly after opening, when skiers found that 2' of the coverage had been blown away by the high winds Sunday morning.