March 23, 2005, Crystal Mt.
3/23/05
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
3338
7
Don't write off the Crystal TAY-Fest yet . . . there's a thin but very firm layer of snow all the way down, skinnable from the patrol parking lot, with more on the way (hopefully) this weekend/next week.
Work schedules made the trip to SR 20 a no-go, so Kevin, Francine and I made a day trip to Crystal, hoping the telemetry-reported 17" in the last 24 for Green Valley was not too optimistic.
The dirt from two weeks ago has been covered with a re-frozen layer of rain/sun crust on the bottom half of the mountain, with 6-8" of wind-affected softish stuff up top. The softer layer was well bonded to what was underneath (grass, rock and dirt); maximum total snow depth on N and N/NE facing aspects was about 18" or so.
Good turns were had in Green Valley on N/NE facing slopes (worth 2 runs) and from the top of Silver Queen, though a lot of pasture is showing looker's right in Powder Bowl.
The top 1 1/2 faces of Lucky Shot were also nice, but turned to virtually unskiable crust within the space of about 50 ft. on the second face. Very serious breakable crust w. 'biler tracks made for heinous and tricky remainder of descent; wide track stem turns or snowplow strongly advised.
More pictures.
Thanks for the report Greg.
I'm suprised you could even ski Lucky-that was virtual dirt one week ago. Great picture!
Joe
I'm suprised you could even ski Lucky-that was virtual dirt one week ago. Great picture!
Joe
More pictures.
Make sure to check the box that says "check this if you'll be adding code (or don't like smileys)", or the ubb code won't work. Just quote my post to see the code.
Glad to hear that Washington is finally getting snow. Since we got spring and summer during winter, maybe we can get winter during spring? I hope so.
Make sure to check the box that says "check this if you'll be adding code (or don't like smileys)", or the ubb code won't work. Just quote my post to see the code.
Glad to hear that Washington is finally getting snow. Since we got spring and summer during winter, maybe we can get winter during spring? I hope so.
Ahhh, check the box! Thanks, Paul.
Greg, that's becoming an extensive and useful collection of trip reports at website does not currently appear in any Google search. I'm not sure why that site is not being indexed by Google, since most other homepage.mac.com sites are. Unless Mike doesn't want anyone to find his website . . .
Hi, Amar - So far my practice has been to only keep trip reports/race reports up for a year or so (so everything there is fairly recent), but I'm reconsidering now as Apple gave us another 100 mb of space for free . . . the search engine thing is a mystery, I have a bunch of keywords and name permutations in meta names, I just thought it was a byproduct of mac.com's weird generic URL policy. Maybe someone else has the answer?
Greg and Co: very nice pictures! the snow looks great and thanks for the report. i'll be back in town late Friday evening, and i'm thinking about a tour on Sat...
Nice picture indeed! With the warm temperatures forecasted for this week end...Crystal will probably not be a good option though >:(
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