April 1 Slot Attempt

Slot Couloir Attempt
April 1st 2012
Brandon, Jim, Ryan

We made a shot for the Slot on Sunday. We hit the parking lot at 8 to find about a dozen cars. On the way up we ended up sharing a skinning track with two other groups. During the first 500 feet we came across a few sections that will be extremely hard to skin after a good rain. It is currently do-able w/o ski crampons. For the next 800 feet we had 3-14" of fresh on top of a pronounced crust layer. Slowly the crust layer disappeared and became a fairly consistent snow pack around 5,000 feet. Around 5,600 feet some serious snow activity started. We had shooting cracks, "whompfing", and thin slabs release on the top 5-8". While choosing a safe line to gain the ridge, summit Snolquamie Mtn and proceed to slot may have been fine we decided to pull the plug. Later in the day we came across a group on snowshoes that had a 60 foot slab release in the same vicinity. Sounds like it was fairly thin.  We took two laps. Shot straight down the track we came up, skinned back up, and then headed down through the phantom slide and skied out the waterfall. About 400 feet above the waterfall the snow was fairly heavy.