November 12-13, 2011, Baker Environs

Needless to say, it's nice to have winter back.  With early season coverage still in effect we headed for Skyline on Saturday hoping to get some turns in up there before the road is snowed in.  We were able to drive to ~2,800' at which point the snow depth became a little much for my Rav4 to handle.  Enjoyed an easy skin up the road to the trailhead:



Plenty of snow where the skin through the forest began.



We lucked out with the visibility, and enjoyed some great snow in the East facing bowls.  Chmnyboy getting deep:



The weak faceted/suncrust layer witnessed by other parties earlier in the week was definitely still present.  We remotely triggered this slide on our first run.  We were standing on a bench about 40-50' away from this convex rollover when it broke loose.



We played it safe skiing mellower semi-treed slopes skiers right, avoiding any major convexities, and enjoyed great snow and decent visibility.



Looking to avoid a long approach today, we headed for the ski area, with Table Mtn/Herman in mind.  Again we enjoyed good snow, coverage and visibility and managed to stay just in front of the gong show that developed on the North side of Table/Blueberry.  We didn't observe any of the instabilities we saw on Skyline on the Baker side (see lower elevation, different aspects)

Allen proving photogs are dorks.



Tyler in action:



Allen in action:



Definitely was another great weekend.  Be safe out there everyone as the snow piles up this week.