June 12, 2004, Yellow Aster Butte/Tomyhoi Country

Even with the possibility of rain, Ned_Flanders, ski_photomatt, Phil_Higuera and I decided that skiing in the rain was still a better option than sitting on the couch and eating TWINKIES.  Actually, I don't mind the TWINKIES part; I like TWINKIES.

We left the Ravenna P&R at 7:30am Saturday morning.  The Twin Lakes road off 542 is open and clear for about 5 miles (4400 ft.).  Snow blocks travel roughly 1 mile past the Tomyhoi TH (4.15 miles from 542; 3600 ft.).  During our approach in the vehicle, we surprised a bear cub and it ran off the road as quickly as possible (tele-phobic).

Parked at 4400 ft. we had a few options before us.   First, the road to Twin Lakes is mostly snow covered and skinable.  We estimated about 1.4 miles to the lakes from where we parked.  Once at the lakes, we could climb and ski the slopes off Winchester Mountain.  I'm sure there's good skiing up there.  The second option was to climb/ski the north couloir that divides the east and west peaks of Goat Mountain.  The only difficulty was finding an easy approach to the base of the couloir to start the climb.  I'm sure there's an easy approach, but we didn't spend any time exploring because it was rapidly approaching 11am.  The third option, and the one we decided, was to drive back down to the Tomyhoi TH (3600 ft.) and try for Tomy.

We started hiking in light shoes at 11am.  Twenty-five minutes later we ran into snow at 4600 ft, 1.1 miles from the TH.  The snow was consolidated enough to continue hiking in shoes and we proceeded in the direction of Gold Run Pass (~5400 ft.).  At 5100 ft., just shy of the pass, we donned skis and traversed climbers left around Yellow Aster Butte and continued contouring around until we found ourselves looking down on several small, frozen lakes.  The snow on the sun aspects at that elevation is quickly melting and sections of the trail are beginning to show above 5000 ft.  From our vantage point at 5700 ft., we could see that Tomyhoi was covered in clouds.  In fact, the ceiling was dropping rather quickly.  We decided to ski down to the lakes and then start the climb toward Tomyhoi Peak, and turn around when visibility was unacceptable.  Our first set of turns down to the lakes was very nice.  The snow was well consolidated, with one to two inches of moderately wet corn; it carved nicely.  No noticeable avi activity either.  From the lakes we skinned toward Tomy.  I was hoping for the weather to suddenly clear up, but it did the exact opposite.  At 6000 ft. visibility degraded and it was snowing lightly.  At this point we decided to stop and turn around.  We skied back down to the lakes and then yo-yoed a hump west of Yellow Aster Butte.  The skiing was also nice, but visibility was poor.  On our way back, we found some excellent tree skiing and ski_photomatt demonstrates his patented "patch-to-patch" transition:




More photos: http://www.leang.com/kam/mountains/tr/tomyhoi_peak

-kam