May 21, 2011, Mt. Hood, Below Wy'east Face

I picked up JS at 5am with plans to leave from the Meadows parking lot and ski the Wy'east Face if the weather cooperated.  As we drove from Portland to Sandy in the rain we began to question the game plan and chose to stall at a coffee shop.  The rain then stopped and we were able to motivate each other to continue up to the mountain an hour later, although we had ruled out any thoughts of skiing Wy'east.  Thankfully it was not raining on the mountain and we were able to ski above the clouds into intermittent sunshine to around 9,000'.   From here we basically skied super bowl.  There was a small amount of new snow that had been moved around by the wind making the skiing herky jerky as the new snow would grab the skis and the old snow was really fast.  The best turns of the day were on the Meadows groomers once we had descended back into the inversion cloud layer and the snow was a bit more consistent.  The Wy'east Face looks great right now, hopefully good weather and my schedule will overlap soon to complete this route.  I forgot my camera so the photos were taken with my phone.