May 8, 2010, Tatoosh range MRNP: decent!

Florian and I rode our bikes from the turnoff above Narada (termed "Canyon Y" by some park staff).  After a short delightful ride we locked bikes to a bent-over snow pole and proceeded with the hardest challenge of the day: getting up onto the snow. We started at the usual place by Reflection Lake #1.  It was discouragingly gloppy in the woods lower down and a little hard getting up onto the ridge.  The snowpack was decent and this made finding a safe corridor to the base of the bowl pretty easy.  Once in the bowl, it was straightforward to climb safely up skier's left near the trees. 

We topped out on a knoll at the usual saddle.  For fun, we proceeded east to the next peaklet (I think it might be called Unicorn, although Unicorn is perhaps a more significant mountain further east).  The drop onto south side slop was wicked gooey.  However the skin up the next hump to the east presaged better things to come.  It spit graupel a little on the way up.  The descent was actually pretty good on a mix of supportive crust and pre-corn.  After a skin up the ridge near the cornice line to our previous knoll (great views of Rainier as one negotiates the wind features), we dropped into the N facing bowl and that was actually fantastic.  An inch or two of penetration, no surprises.  And did I mention the snow was all completely untouched?  We got down to where the other bowl branches to the west (sorry for sketchy peak names).  A quick 20 minutes and we were up at the next saddle to the west of our main destination.  This N facing bowl-let was shorter but steeper and quite fine.  The ski out to the road was actually quite tolerable even down the ridgelet and into the flats.  Transition to bike: meet the wife at Narada falls.

They opened the road from Canyon Y to Snow Lake today.  Go and get it.  Plenty of releases from cliffs above the snowfields sending debris patterns down, and south facing slopes looked  like they had suffered plenty of spontaneous wet loose action.  But the north facing aspects away from cliff-bottoms all seemed fine. We did not dig a pit but did not encounter any slabbiness, cracking or hollowness.  A few pictures/movies at http://www.flickr.com/photos/koelle/  sorry about the dirt on the lens!