April 10, 2004, Mt. Baker via Coleman-Deming.

John Mauro and I headed up to the Heliotrope Ridge trail head late Friday night, where we were stopped by snow at about 3100', ca. 2 miles from the trial head. With a few hours of pseudo sleep, we left the car at 4 am, just as one other solo skier arrived. The road to the trail head was entirely skiable, but a 4WD truck with big tires could drive it at this point (and it looked like one or more had). The flashlight beam from the other skier helped keep us on route a few times, but in general the path through the woods was very well defined. We had to dismount a few times, but about 99% of the trail was snow covered. We left the woods as dawn was greeting us and cramponed up some of the steeper portions below Heliotrope Ridge. The route all the way up is in great shape and plenty of tracks took away most route-finding challenges. We were at the top by 11 am and took in the *incredible* views (understatement), napped, and enjoyed the sunny, wind-free summit for about two hours. We shared half that time with the solo skier and otherwise saw no one else up there. By 1pm the Roman Wall had softened up enough to make skiing reasonable, but there are a lot of wind ridges between 1-2 ft. tall that made it difficult to achieve any sort of rhythm. The upper portion of the Coleman was still firm, but fun skiing, and by about 9000 ft. (1:30 pm) we hit the silky smooth corn snow we were waiting for. After a 500 ft. yo-yo run we continued our decent on the wide open slopes and enjoyed consistent corn all the way down to tree line. Here the snow turned isothermal and proved troublesome for at least one author of this TR. (Unsolicited advice: remove your whipit before descending). Whipit removed, we continued our decent through the woods, were back at the car by 5 pm, and back in Seattle before sundown. Spring in the Cascades is a wonderful time of year!  ;D