April 20-21, 2004, Blue Lake/Birthday Tour

Kevin said we had to get in our trip to SR 20 before all the snow was gone, so we did. After a 12:30 PM start due to my working late the night before, we arrived at the Blue Lake Trailhead around 4:00, under warm spring skies. Immediately set off to tour up to Blue Lake, following several sets of skin tracks from earlier in the day - soft corn, perfect skinning traction, and sun! The turns down to the lake were smooth and perfect, but as we skinned up from the lake the snow on the western aspects of the cirque were turning to mush. Made an on-the-spot decision to check out the couloir just south of the lake which was in the shade and had a northern exposure - the snow seemed good, about 6-8" of fresh over some frozen avy debris. Could only skin about 1/3 the way up the couloir, switching to boots/crampons for the remainder, with the middle averaging about 45 degrees and the top in the upper 40's. The skiing was pretty cool; what looked like an awkward off-camber run actually had a decent fall line and good turns were had. Quite a bit of sloughing of the new snow, but the underlayer held firm.

Day two began under heavy snowfall, but the skies began to clear during the oatmeal course, so we continued with our plans to do the Birthday Tour - skinning up was a bit tricky on the thin fresh layer over hard-frozen base until we hit the South Early Winters Spire; the section above that was through about 10" of untracked fresh and would probably have been the best skiing of the trip, but we were going up. The last 200 ft. or so needed to be booted, but were straighforward.

Skiing on the mellow, east-facing backside was a treat, huge bowls of untracked with conditions ranging from windpacked pow to perfect sun-softened corn at the bottom. The barometric pressure dropped like a rock and heavy snow started to fall as we began the skin back up the bowl to the north, but it went pretty quickly.

The final ski down to US 20 through the burned-out trees was great, about 12" of fresh over a frozen corn base at top, a little less below. The ski out through the trees at the bottom was marred by numerous frozen snomobile tracks, but getting a ride back to the Blue Lake Trailhead about 30 seconds after arriving at the road made up for it.

More pictures here: http://homepage.mac.com/mpobrien/bluelake.htm