February 5, 2004, Silver Peak

Silver Peak is a fun trip because it requires different styles of travel.  You start with several miles of road skiing up Cold Creek, then skin up glades and bowls toward the summit and finally scramble along a windswept ridge to the top.

I had a lull in my contract work today, so I headed up after dropping off my son at school.  I wanted a trip where I could cover some distance, see some views, but avoid serious terrain since I was by myself.  I left Hyak at 11 a.m.  and skated the first mile or so along the groomed road.  When the road started climbing, I put inch-wide skins on my skis.  These didn't glide as well as I hoped, but I found I could get pretty good glide by setting one ski in a track left by a snowmobile runner.  I used a sort of lopsided, peg-leg stride, the way Captain Ahab might have skied if he'd been Norwegian.

Above Windy Pass I switched to full-width skins and climbed through timber to the upper bowl on the peak.  The final slope below the northwest ridge was windblown--poor for skiing but safe from avalanches.  As I crossed the ridge the surface got icy so I started to put on harscheisen. Cleverly--I thought--I kneeled and slipped the harscheisen on my Dynafit bindings without taking my skis off.  But when I stepped on the left ski--SNAP--I broke the plastic binding piece that the harscheisen slides into.  (I hadn't inserted it correctly.) Ouch!

The southwest flank of the ridge got icier and steeper, so I took the skis off, tied them to a small tree and scrambled to the summit with crampons and self-arrest poles.

On the trip back, the turns weren't great--too windblown--but the schuss was great payback for those uphill miles.  I tucked and poled down the hill from Windy Pass then skated the last gentle uphill mile to the ski area.  I got back to my car by 3 pm, in time to beat the rush hour and pick up my son at the after-school club.