January 25, 2014, Pinnacle and Plummer Corn

The south slopes of Pinnacle Peak and The Castle

PeterC was in town desperate for some skiing, so we decided to do a little corn farming in the Tatoosh. The Longmire gate opened at 9:00 AM.
Narada Face looked potentially too icy to easily ascend, so we went up the snowshoe trail, which was slippery but skinnable.
Ascent from Reflection Lakes was good until a couple hundred vertical feet below Castle Bowl, where it got icy and slippery. New ski crampons made short order of that and the ascent SW towards Pinnacle/Castle Saddle, where we separated paths from the other skiing group.
The semi-steep traverse to the final pitch up to Pinnacle saddle wasn't great due to ice; the final 100 vertical was a bit scary - Peter was happy for his whippet and I was happy to skin with one pole and an ice axe.

The descent down the big open bowl on the south side of Pinnacle in the sun was pure corny goodness. We descended the bowl then continued down into the increasingly dense small trees for maybe about 1500 ft before skinning up to the Pinnacle/Plummer saddle.
We descended a steep and narrow, but quite short little shot through the trees into the large northeast bowl on Plummer.
We really got the goods here, as you can see from this video: