June 26, 2010, North Sister, Early Morning Couloir

With spring finally here I hiked in to North Sister to do some skiing.  I hadn't been climbing on the east side of North Sister for years so it was time again.  It brought back a lot of old memories of me getting acquainted with climbing. 

The impressive size 4 avalanche from awhile ago is still very much there.

   

The first objective was Early Morning Couloir, the central gully.

Looking down on the destruction from the avalanche from the start of Early Morning Couloir.  The amount of material moved in this one is remarkable.  Some of the best camp spots are buried under a mini Khumbu icefall.

   

Conditions in the couloir are decent, though there is significant runnels at this point.  There is always rockfall in here no matter what.  As is often the case on some of the Oregon Cascades, you just kind of roll the dice that you won't get hit by any of it and stay out of the way of obvious paths.

The view down from Glisan Pinnacle:

   

The snowpack is basically an isothermal snowcone right now, so getting on steeper stuff like this was a little interesting.  A few turns would yield a significant sluff that would start pushing you around if you didn't keep it under control.  Overall, the skiing was surprisingly good though.

The condition of the runnels at the exit of the couloir.  You can see my boot and ski tracks to the left of the runnels, which was good snow:

   

More of the khumbu icefall:

   

I ran into some friends over on the Villard Glacier so we went up and skied down some great snow near the Linn Glacier:

   

Shades of the SW Chutes on Adams...

   


It was great to be back on one of the mountains that has taught me a lot of the hard lessons of mountaineering over the years!  Here's to Oregon in the springtime.