April 27, Mt Bailey, Oregon

Skiied Mt Bailey from the Three Lakes snowpark on Saturday. Quite a lot of snow from the snowpark, but access involes following NF-3073 to NF-380 for around 3 miles. After that I decided I would just aim to the south ridge as the snow was deep and the forest relatively open.



Despite trying to start early (left car at 8am, which I hoped would be early enough for the 3000ft) it was getting very hot and the south face looked intimidating so I traversed towards the summer path along south ridge. Beautiful views across diamond lake to Mt Thielsen. I was just starting to really enjoy the ascent with views of the SE bowl and then I heard a swarm of giant angry wasps, AKA snowmobilers. I had seen the trackes all over the place, including all along NF380 where they are not allowed, but hoped they wouldn't be around the mountain but a half dozen of them were high-pointing all the way to the summit.  Bummer. I tried to ignore them but the noise was incessant as I progressed towards the summit along the ridge.



The traverse took a surprising amount of time to cross around the rocks, on the W the snow was very hard ice, the E side was waist deep warm slop.  Got to the summit and had lunch in relative peace watching all the summits, McLoughlin to the south to Jefferson to the north- of course Thielsen looked magnificent. I was just thinking how surprisingly quite it was and realised the snowmobiles had left. So I quickly clipped in to my skis for fear they would return and began the descent down SE Bowl, and anyway it was baking hot and the snow getting very soft. Snowmobilers had left deep trenches over much of the slopes but there was still plenty of smooth snow. A plus point of the snowmobilers is that they load-tested the slope.



Snow was great soft corn, dream to ski, but then came the even longer slog back to the car. Unlike other peaks this was very much a long flat exit, the warm sticky snow meant that there was little gliding for the pole effort.



My original plan was to look into skiing the north side before skinning back up, or maybe just lapping the SE bowl. However, with the hot temperatures and snowmobilers a quick exit was in order. Plus it took a surprising amount of time just on the approach. The benefit was energy in reserves for Diamond Peak Sunday...