Home > Trip Reports > May 31, 2009, Mt Adams, SW Chutes

May 31, 2009, Mt Adams, SW Chutes

5/31/09
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
3926
5
Posted by Richard Conner on 6/1/09 1:36pm
Leigh and I drove down to Mt Adams on Saturday, parked 3.5 miles from the Cold Springs TH, then tried to catch a couple of Z's.    Woke up at 3am, skinned the road to the TH.  There were a lot of people up there.  We summitted at 1pm, then began the descend down to the SW chutes.    The ski from the summit back to piker's peak was suncupped and awful.    The Chutes however were perfect by about 2pm.    By far the best way to descend is straight down the fall line to Morrison Springs CG, which puts you less than half a mile from the cars.  Of course, this is dependent upon your cars being parked closed to Morrison Springs CG.
I'm glad the line down to the Morrision Creek campground worked out for you  ;)
( I was the guy looking for the chevron on the summit)

Great day up there for sure.  we skied the chutes at 12:30 and it was perfect.  we also skied a line skiers left off the summit that lets you bypass the crappy snow from the summit. Glad you had a good time, I like your dogs' sunglasses!

Chris

Nice work!! I met you and Amos (sp?) right below the summit. He wasn't sporting those kick ass glasses, though! Glad to see you had a great ski/board down. :)

Group of us were up there Saturday.  We dropped into the Chutes about 2:30 and were just a little late.  The upper 1/3 was a bit icy due to the COLD westerly winds blowing through. The middle 1/3 was great corn, but the rest was schmoo, actually deep in places.  It was fun though!!  We followed some boot tracks out of that basin around 7500ft and ended up right below the Crescent on the South Side.  We were all happy with this until the death march down the road.  Gotta learn that Morrison Creek escape!!
Thanks for the beta I received from posters last week on the traverse out though!!  Another great day in the mountains though we were without the "cool" dog  ;)

We thought that the snow actually got better lower on the mountain.  Here is the theory - the snow up high is not as well consolidated since the warm temps had just started 10 days earlier, yet down low, it has been much warmer for longer with less new snow in early May.  So on a warm day like Sunday it is pretty mushy up high, where the snow down low is much denser already.

Great meeting up with you and Lee at the summit -- funny that we e-mailed the day before and met on the summit.  We saw you chasing us down SW Chutes, and then ended up on some fun terrain that seemingly had little other traffic.  It was the creek to skiers right of Morrison Creek -- last 2 miles and 1000 feet were very flat and painfully tedious.  We were hoping you didn't follow us down -- sounds like you stayed left where we went right.

I've been too busy this week to pull out any pictures to post.  It'll be a great ski for a few more weeks.

Reply to this TR

6497
may-31-2009-mt-adams-sw-chutes
Richard Conner
2009-06-01 20:36:01