April 13, 2009, Blewett Pass, Diamond Head

After some great turns on Saturday (see several posts down on Jim Hill TR) decided to see what the east side was like. What luck! no breakable crust over here! Skinned/booted up to a couple hundred feet shy of the summit (again) and tried to commence a ski descent on the extremely firm, smooth, and steep western flank. I started to ski down: "chatter, chatter, slide slip, chatter, turn, chatter, chatter." Nope, too sketchy. No sun softening here. So we booted back down a couple hundred feet, had lunch, and tried to give the sun some time to soften things up. Problem was the cool breeze and clouds didn't help much. But we gave it another go on less steep and less exposed terrain, this time we where able to do a bit of skiing. It was firm and wanted to turn to corn, but the lack of sun and the cool breeze just wasn't producing any corn today. Had the mountain to ourselves however, which was great. Didn't see a soul. Skied/skated all the way down the road to the trailhead

There is really only one semi-continuous path down the western side of Diamond Head at this point and even this one path isn't continuous all the way from the summit. On this most continuous route (of the western side) there is what looks like a 100' section of rock/scree between the upper most snow field and the summit where one would have to boot it to the summit. Might be different on the northern side but didn't get a look at it.

The road is still all covered in snow, but mostly less than a foot deep. A week of warm weather should change all that and make for an annoying approach.