Breakaway Ski Day: Three-way peak vicinity

"Play hookie tomorrow? Mmm... velvety turns."
You can always trust a good ski partner to tempt you into shirking all responsibility and heading for the hills on any given day, but especially the sunny spring ones (or powdery cold winter ones, or hot corny summer ones, or first freshy fall ones... I digress.)

About to have a breakdown because of work overload, not sure how to cope with some personal heartbreak, and tempted by the forecast of possible sunbreaks, it was time to make a breakaway. You bet I'm playing hookie!

After some frantic last minute planning, working and an effort to farm out the kids--I was ready to go by the break of dawn. Neil Turner, aka Ed, is a little less enthusiastic about early mornings so we compromised on 6AM.  ;) While Tacoma was sunny, heavy clouds looked ominous over Crystal and Rainier. We almost made a last minute call to head for the pass, but decided to stick with the original plans. Upon arrival, the sun broke through, the clouds broke up and we eagerly began climbing towards Silver Basin. There was a fresh dusting of snow at the base and even more as we gained elevation into the basin. At this point, we turned roughly east into the trees encountering about 4 inches of light powder on a firm, but penetrable layer. It looked very promising. To be honest we weren't exactly sure where we reached the ridge line (identified it on a map, but no names), the closest peak however was three-way and the slopes we were eyeing were mostly north facing. We stopped for some lunch, probably for too long, as a very light fog drifted through, then made our descent on a pristine slope of--you guessed it--breakable crust! At this point we traversed further north/east hoping to experience some of the lighter fluff that we had encountered on the way up but it was really much heavier after the fog and very difficult to turn in. After two or three faceplants, I resorted to survival "downtrack" skiing--perfect zigzags and downfacing kick turns  :) to save myself any further ankle injury while Ed made a hodgepodge of turns and faceplants in the heavy "brake-like" skiing--just when you thought it might be good enough to gain some momentum, you'd come to a screeching halt. The day concluded with a few more faceplants and then lunch on the chair and good beer in the sun.

So, it wasn't the corn harvest we had hoped for, no thanks to new snow, but any day in the sun on skis with good friends beats any day in the office by a mile. Thanks, Ed.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/teleskichica/CrystalBreakaway#