April 21-22, 2013, Mount Hardy - Needles Traverse

I have long looked at the mountains north of Highway 20 while climbing at Washington Pass and wondered what skiing possibilities existed out there. A few minutes of map reading showed a potentially great tour connecting Mount Hardy, Tower Mountain, and The Needles€”each of which features close to 2,000€™ north facing ski descents. So on Sunday, under stormy skies, Forest McBrian and I departed from the Easy Pass trailhead intent on skiing eastward over the crest of the Cascades to investigate.

We climbed though tight trees and gained elevation quickly up the western flank of Mount Hardy. We had hoped to ski one of the steeper couloirs off Hardy, but stormy weather and sloughy snow forced us to our backup plan€”down the easy way into the West Fork of the Methow River. There were just enough larch trees dotting the gully to provide contrast in the flat light.

Our second climb took us eastward to Snowy Lakes Pass and onward to Tower Mountain. As forecast, the weather started to clear allowing us to spy the correct gully that leads to a narrow notch in the bulking massif of Tower.  A quick boot brought us to the narrow col and a short rappel over a cornice. We giddily skied 2,200€™ of powder that gradually thinned from boot deep to dust-on-crust near the valley floor.


Skiing the North Couloir of Tower Mountain.


This is what we came for. Touring along the ridge towards The Needles.

After a surprisingly chilly night, we continued along the crest of the ridge towards The Needles. This section was incredibly aesthetic, but not quite as straightforward as we had expected. We gained the col below Point 8140€™ and peered down into the Leap Creek drainage. Another 2000€™ of excellent powder skiing awaited us. A final short climb up to Delancy Ridge positioned us for nearly 3000€™ of sunny, t-shirt corn skiing back down to Highway 20.

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