June 13, 2010, Mt Adams

It started with an instant message on June  7th. "Still 5 feet of snow at the parking lot below avalanche gulch on Mt Shasta." The message was meant to tease my friend Christian, who lives in the wrong Washington (DC).  We weren't going to do a Cascades trip this year, but a few messages later we dediced that we had to ski at least for a weekend. After our semi-epic Adams trip mid May 2008 with an 8 mile approach and a 3100 m (10200 ft) elevation gain we thought mid June is probably a better time to ski Mt Adams. Christian booked a flight for Friday and we sent an email to our friends to see who would join us.  Bill  said he would be in. The weather forecast was good, the avi forecast was awful. We went anyway. We drove down to SeaTac where we picked up Christian on Friday.  On Saturday we skied a smaller peak near Mt Adams and saw that the snow was actually quite good if one is on the way down no later than noon.

We stayed in Trout Lake and got up at 2 am. The road was in good shape and we drove our FWD sedan to 1400 m (4600 ft), not far from the Morrison Creek camp site. We almost felt a little guilty for driving our noisy and smelly car through this nice and quiet forest.  We started hiking at 3:30 am. Continuous snow for skinning started about 45 minutes from the car and at 11:30 we were on the summit. Excellent weather. Almost no wind. Excellent views. We saw some hikers but no skiers. Maybe the skiers read the avi report and the hikers didn't. Good snow on the way up, and good snow on the way down. At least for the first 1300 m vertical. Then the snow got deep for while, but at the tree line the snow was good again. We saw no signs of avalanche activity along the south spur. On the way down we saw a wet avalanche in the bowl west of the south spur (at ~ 2600m (8500 ft)).  A few snowmobiles passed us as we skied on the road to the car. We won't feel guilty again for driving.

We had planned to go up to Camp Muir on Monday but after a nice dinner and some wine the motivation was gone and we stayed one more night in Trout Lake. We didn't regret it, as we already had a great weekend with great skiing.