December 15, 2004, Skyline Ridge

My wife Jill and I headed up to Skyline Ridge today to enjoy the sun and hopefully a few turns on what I expected to be a few inches of wet snow on top of a hard rain crust.  We did get great weather 8).  We were stripped down to long johns and t-shirts on the skin up (in December!).  We had a great lunch in the sun on the saddle north of Skyline Lake before (well our plan was anyways) dropping north into the trees for a run.  That plan was aborted after one tough turn and all of 30 seconds of deliberation as the crust, while covered with 2-3 inches of new wet snow, was weak and breakable over a sopping foot of slurp.  We found similar conditions on all aspects.

We decided to save our knees for better snow, hiked back to the saddle, and made a harrowing decent down the hard-packed road back to the car.  The decent down the short treed slope from the saddle to skyline lake was nothing short of comical.  I'll be waiting for more snow or several freeze-thaw cycles before heading up to the Stevens Pass area again.