Home > Trip Reports > March 21, 2010, Springtime in Hel, Cannon Mtn

March 21, 2010, Springtime in Hel, Cannon Mtn

3/21/10
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Posted by ADappen on 3/24/10 7:03am
A week ago, with the vernal equinox bearing down upon us, Tom Janisch and I searched for an appropriate destination to celebrate the day. Where better to sample some heat, we decided, than to ski Cannon Mountain via Hel Basin.

March 21 arrives and shortly after dawn we€™re walking through the shadow of spring. Unlike two weeks ago, we now need to walk rather than ski the first two miles of the Eightmile Road leading to the Stuart Lake Trailhead.

Four miles up the road and another mile up the Stuart Lake Trail, we strike off cross-country and skin upward through mushy snow. Soon the slopes leading to Hel Basin greet us with their  jumble of truck-sized boulders and boulder-sized avalanche debris. We wander upward through all this detritus and soon reach Hells Gate, a bulge of blue ice that, once scrambled, provides the easiest entrance to the basin. Skis and poles are replaced by crampons and ice axes and, half an hour later, we enter Hel.

Contrary to  Dante€™s Inferno, our Hel is sacred with orange-tinged larch trees, salt and pepper granite boulders, charcoal spires, Photo Shopped blue skies, and white-barked pines€¦which are green.  It€™s all so Sierra like, but more compact€¦more neck crimping. Which means, of course, that it must be the Cascades.

We climb through spring, enjoying the sun as it occasionally vaporizes holes in the clouds and rains heat and skin cancer over us. At the 7,300-foot level, however, we approach a curious portal. Over the course of several steps, we move from spring on protected slopes to winter on a wind-buffeted ridge. We slip on windshells and attack the remaining 1,300 vertical feet of the climb, confident it will succumb to our awesomeness.

The first third of the ridge bows before us. The second third seriously shifts the flow of respect. There€™s no longer enough snow to skin upward  yet the patches of white between all the rock outcrops are thigh-deep pools of sugar snow that mire us.

The final third of the ridge is being whipped with even stronger winds that are super cooling anything warm. Hel is freezing over. So are my fingers, lips, ears, and eyes. My desire to reach the top has already frozen.

€œWhat happened to spring?€ Tom asks.

€œLet€™s look for it down lower.€

Tom has no objections. We return to 7,300-foot portal dividing the seasons and linger here. Should we sample spring corn on the south-facing slopes we climbed? Or should we drop over the opposite side of the ridge and look for powder, the fruit of winter, on a north-facing avalanche path?

In the end, we discover we€™re really not creatures of springtime. We violate the mission that brought us here and go hunting for powder.  And we find it €“nearly two thousand vertical feet of it.

Over the course of two hours, we drop from avalanche paths to forests, forests to trails, and trails to roads. As we drop,  not even aspect can hold back the tide of season. The snow morphs from powder to some substrate resembling a used Pamper.  And then, strangely, it just disappears. Poof. Gone. And we€™re walking the last two miles of dirt road leading back to the car.

On the ascent, the difference between dirt and snow hardly mattered. On the descent, however, the road would be such an easy glide. And walking this sucker is such tedium€¦such Hell. Winter may have bested us up on Cannon's summit ridge, but here and now I€™m wishing Hell would freeze over again.

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I was thinking of checking out Cannon soon, what made you take the Hel Basin approach?  How bad was the "ice bulge", were ice tools necessary or was it straighforward with crampons?

I'm not grossly familiar with the area, but I'd planned on heading up the old road that continues from the lake stuart parking lot.  Maybe that's just too long an approach...

We skied Hel Basin mainly for the novelty factor. We've both skied a number of other lines on Cannon and, on the first day of spring, it seemed like a nice juxtaposition to visit Hell.

We'd also looked into the basin from Cashmere Mtn a few weeks earlier and it looked like nice terrain.

Regarding the ice bulge, it was simple from a climbing standpoint but still attention-getting for those of us who prefer planks over spiked feet. There was perhaps 70  feet of traversing and climbing on blue ice or ice covered with a skin of snow before the snow plumped up again for easy booting. Aluminum crampons and a lightweight mountaineering axe were fine for the job but it would have been tricky to move through here without them.

It looks like a great tour and a beautiful basin!
Thanks for the beta on the ice bulge.

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march-21-2010-springtime-in-hel-cannon-mtn
ADappen
2010-03-24 14:03:22