May 20, 2013, South Sisters

5/20/13

OR elsewhere

2651

3

Posted by jtack on 5/23/13 2:46pm

I had to make a trip to central Oregon, so I decided to take the skies, and hope for weather to ski something. The forecast was for decent weather, but on the drive down, it was not looking all that good. The plan was to stay somewhere near the South Sisters trail head and see what the morning looked like. At 0400 the sky was clear, the snow was hard and I started fussing around with coffee and breakfast. We were on our way by 0615 and the traveling was on hard snow, so we started out booting. Once we made it out of the trees and onto the flats we donned our skis and made good time to the base of the mountain. It was so exciting to be on the mountain in such ideal conditions, the last time I was their it was hot, dry and smokey. I had a hard time rounding up 800 feet of skiing on the Lewis Glacier. Today we would ski the whole way, and in near ideal conditions. I made the summit by 1100 had a nice visit with a climber, and by then there was about two inches of perfect corn. We managed to kick and glide accost the flats, without skins, and the decent through the trees to the road was painless. We were in lawn chairs drinking cold beer by 1300, a perfect dumb luck ski. The next day it alternated pouring rain, and snowing. I wanted to get one more ski, so I made a short tour up the North side of Mt. Bachelor in bullet proof, and snowing sideways. It's always nice to be lucky!