May 15, 2004, Mt Lassen

Hi my name is Tim and I am new to this site. This was my first backcountry snowboarding trip to mt lassen. I live in Redding CA and I look on it every morning before I head to school and always wished of boarding it. Well last weekend I decided to check it out the devestated area looked like a pretty good area to achieve my goal. So I planned a trip for the next saturday and went from there.

Friday roles around and we decided we were definately making the trip. So the next morning we took off getting to the devestated area parking lot around 8:30 am and taking of minutes before 9:00 . We talked to a few tele skiiers planning to head for the summit also weather permitting as there was several dark cumulus clouds lurking over the summit threatening to dump percipitation. So we were off making our slow accent (using snow shoes) from the parking lot and the snow was somewhat firm as we left getting much more slushy. There were two other tele skiiers ahead of us who had already made a decent from the top before we reached even half way and they headed up again. It was a tough hike but we made it to the summit around 1:00 pm as we are extremely outta shape. I talked to the skiiers that came from the other parking lot and they said we were hiking a much longer and strenuous 3500vft or so were the other side was only a 2000vft from the bumpass hell area.

We took our time ate some lunch then made our decent. The snow was great having a recent snow fall of somewhere around 5 to 10 inchs of snow which had left all the snow nice and flat with very few suncups which were around 8000 ft and below. It was all nice corn snow but pulled on my board as I decended making it very difficult to make it to the parking lot with out having to make a walk through the snow. But over all it was great and I plan to snowboard the south east face next saturday.