January 9, 2005, Silver Basin, Crystal Lakes

Rob and I took the five dollar ride up the Crystal Mountain Quicksilver chair and then skinned up an established track. The forest was beautifully laden with cold fluffy snow, and coverage was good even in stands of trees. The high temperature for the day was probably in the low 20s. We followed a track up into the bottom of the bowl, where we met the track's two creators, then broke trail to the top of the little forested knoll in the middle of the bowl. There were some slight wind effects in places on the way up, and from 10-20 inches of snow above the crust. We did a short run off the knoll in very nice, cohesionless snow. Then we started back up our skin track but climbed left to get to a little saddle just west of Three Way Peak. Speeding up our track, Joe, Brian, and Mark joined us and we did a run back into Silver Basin. The snow itself was good, as on our first run, but in places there were unnerving bumps somewhere deeper.

We then took our skin track up to the knoll and followed the extension just set by another party climbing across the bowl toward the SW. As we got higher and onto more of a NE to E aspect, wind effects became much more pronounced, with thin wind-stiffened snow and bare crust. The party above of us was clearly working extra hard climbing the crust, so we angled over for the main saddle to stay in soft snow. With high hopes from ericd's earlier report, we started south down the back side toward upper Crystal Lake.  As a little rib developed, two of us headed left to ski down toward the upper end of upper Crystal Lake, and three of us headed right for a run which ended below the lake's outlet. It turned out that the snow heading down left was considerably wind affected (more SE aspect), and right was deep and cohesionless (more SW aspect). Our skin back up to the saddle, mixed in with a group of four skiers, was highlighted by the appearance of sunshine, blue sky, and sparkly snowflakes gently drifting by.

Back at the saddle, we went a little bit east to start down the slope. The snow quality was great - no wind effects - but there a few rocks and even one bush to watch for. There was time (and energy) left for one more run on this slope, and then we glided the skin track and down the ski area with quads burning.