January 9, 2005, Tatoosh
1/9/05
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
2037
0
Proof that tele and rando kids can get along (at least for a day)...tele guys Mike U. and Carl G. toured to the saddle just east and below the Castle with David W. and me for a rewarding trip.
Gotta love the bootpack up the first couple hundred feet of vert. out of the Narada Falls lot. I'm guessing the frequent postholing between boulders is the reason nobody chose to ski down it at the end of the day. Although it looked like a tempting shortcut we chose the toboggan course as our final run-out to the car.
Other than being passed by some gents twice our age on the uptrack, the tour to the saddle on the pre-set skin track was unventful. God bless those guys for modeling our retirement years for us.
We dug a 24" pit at about 6300' north apsect 28 degrees. On the compression test the top 6 inches of powder sheared on strike 11 on what looked like a broken hoar layer. No further settling was seen in the test. A shear test of the column yielded no further results, but we finally leveraged the block off 24" down at a layer of granular resting on top of a rock hard crust...that looked a little scary, especially as more snow accumulates. This was the most complex snowpack we'd seen so far this year,lots of layers, crusts... probably due to location and the irregular weather pattern. The pit served our purposes in that we felt relatively safe skiing that aspect, but I'll leave a more detailed analysis up to the true experts.
Skiing in the soft, light top layer powder was excellent although the depth was variable depending on wind effect. There were a few rocks sticking through on ridges and roll-overs and the occasionally in the middle of powder fields.
Here's a shot of three serfs below the Castle:
Gotta love the bootpack up the first couple hundred feet of vert. out of the Narada Falls lot. I'm guessing the frequent postholing between boulders is the reason nobody chose to ski down it at the end of the day. Although it looked like a tempting shortcut we chose the toboggan course as our final run-out to the car.
Other than being passed by some gents twice our age on the uptrack, the tour to the saddle on the pre-set skin track was unventful. God bless those guys for modeling our retirement years for us.
We dug a 24" pit at about 6300' north apsect 28 degrees. On the compression test the top 6 inches of powder sheared on strike 11 on what looked like a broken hoar layer. No further settling was seen in the test. A shear test of the column yielded no further results, but we finally leveraged the block off 24" down at a layer of granular resting on top of a rock hard crust...that looked a little scary, especially as more snow accumulates. This was the most complex snowpack we'd seen so far this year,lots of layers, crusts... probably due to location and the irregular weather pattern. The pit served our purposes in that we felt relatively safe skiing that aspect, but I'll leave a more detailed analysis up to the true experts.
Skiing in the soft, light top layer powder was excellent although the depth was variable depending on wind effect. There were a few rocks sticking through on ridges and roll-overs and the occasionally in the middle of powder fields.
Here's a shot of three serfs below the Castle:
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