Home > Trip Reports > February 28, 2009, Crystal BC

February 28, 2009, Crystal BC

2/28/09
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
2547
5
Posted by Charlie Hagedorn on 2/28/09 2:04pm
Will and I headed up for our first visit to the terrain near Crystal. Found mighty  fun shady snow on all  aspects. Snow with solar exposure acquired a crust through the day. Nice to meet haggis, Jeff and friend, as well as a friendly soloist.

Stabilitywise, nobody I talked to had seen anything move all day, nor did we. I was able to get nice clean shears on little hand/skintrack tests, but fracture propagation and consolidated snow seemed largely absent. Weak layers ran the gamut from sparkly hoar-looking layers to crusty faceted stuff about a foot down. Very spatially variable. Facets/crunchy only appeared in areas with solar exposure - formed from/near a sun crust?

Shady aspects should still have fun, if slowly heavier, snow tomorrow, if it decides not to rain...
Here's a few more from Crystal BC on 2/28. Stellar conditions lead to everything within easy reach of the inbounds getting slaughtered like I've never seen.





You can see a small avy lookers left in this pic. This was the only sign of instability I saw the whole day

Nice work the North Facing slopes were holding some great conditions.

Really nice day. Nice to run into you trumpetsailor.








I was just gonna buy a ticket and do the demos, but several factors conspired to change my plans to a BC day
* Late start
* ... leading to full parking lots (but thankfully found a squeezer right in Lot C)
* and mighty crowds
* Got targeted for revenue enhancement by WSP on that ridiculous 35 zone CM Blvd as it straightens out (noticed later how there are 2 plowed out pullouts right there either side of road ... guess what those are for ... they could be handing out tix as fast as they can fill out which is obviously the idea). And not buying a lift ticket would offset half paying the "nonlift" ticket ...
* Weather looked like it would hold (and it did very nicely)

Definitely a good BC day. Tried both minibasins Bullion-side off 6479, NW and NE. A little heavy but fun. Hasty pit showed two layers of windslab just off top 6479 N facing, medium hard 4" then soft another 9" then footplus springlike stuff where I stopped digging. Easy to shear both isolated but compression didn't move it. Bullion not as crowded as I've seen in past. Found one of the old runs on way down because was tired of the usual luge run that the exit becomes, that was a welcome variation.

Great day and nice to meet some chilled folk up there.  We were all down in the dumps on the way up with at least 20 folk that we saw, however we only saw 5 others during riding part of the day so all good in the end.

That place always seems to be good to me - long may it continue.

Reply to this TR

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february-28-2009-crystal-bc
Charlie Hagedorn
2009-02-28 22:04:33