April 11, 2004, White Salmon/Upper Curtis Glacier

Paul and I decided to leave Saturday from Seattle around 9:30am, with the intent to overnight it somewhere along the ridge leading up to the saddle for the North Face.  Skinned along the cat track and went under the rope at the base of Chair 8.  Continuing relatively high along the ridgeline we thought the traverse along the lower flanks of the Shuksan Arm would be straightforward.  Turns out the coverage was pretty meager along some of the drainages we crossed.  Deciding to drop in on one of the open slopes lead us to the convergence of 2 streams and a sketchy downclimb (which ended up cliffing out).  After skinning back up we stayed high in the trees eventually leading to the open lower avi debri fields of Shuksan Arm.  From here the skin was straightforward and we decided to camp in the trees at 4,300' on the slope heading up to the base of the N. Face.

Left camp at 7:15 and began skinning the breakable crust for approx. the 1st 1,000'.  Due to recent slide activity over the past week, the skin track from the Nooksak Traverse gang was whiped-out along with several climber paths.  We found boot path, but despite crampons we still found ourselves postholing in the existing tracks (creating our own was no better), and it was too icy along with too much avi debri to consider skinning.  As a result, the inefficiency of postholing allowed us to finally reach the top of the first saddle in around 3 hrs.  Decided to top out on the Upper Curtis Glacier before the traverse over to Hells Highway.  It was before noon, so we decided to wait in hopes of things softening up for the ski down.

Paul ran into a climbing couple he knew who's camp was on the Upper Curtis & that's where we waiting for the sun to make it's way over to the White Salmon.  Decided to go for it around 1ish, with the upper slopes consisting primarily of ice.  Conditions did not change until approx. 500' or so below the main saddle leading to the lower White Salmon where it turned primarily to a breakable crust.  Turns for over 2,000' for me consisted of the pedal hop that I learned from Hattrup  ;), which actually made it a great training run for tough conditions.  Paul on the other hand was not happy with the conditions.  Anyway, seeing the other ski tracks on the Glacier had us wondering when it was skied (looked maybe 1 or 2 days old) as they clearly had corn or packed powder conditions.  With temps 80 degrees in the lowlands, we were wondering if maybe we should have waited another hour, but maybe the conditions wouldn't have gotten any better.  About 1,000' above camp conditions were obviously quite sloppy with having the greatest sun exposure all morning.

The hike out (up the recommended clear-cut & small tree slope that punches you out at the base of Chair 8) was some of the worst bushwacking up 45 degree dirt & rock adjacent to the creek I've ever encountered....enuf said.  I think next time I'll ski out to the entire drainage to the main road.