January 9, 2005, snoqualmie potato festival

Yanna and I hooked up with three other TAY folks for a short drive based on the prior night's hope that the 6-9" would materialize at the pass. As of the morning coffee, no dice according to telemetry, whereas Paradise seemed to have gotten it. Well, maybe it was just that it had switched to snow late down low, but as we ascended we'd find the goods.

Our dawn patrollers met up in Issaquah at the shockingly early hour of, err, 8:30. The rain changed mostly to snow as we arrived at the pass. Hmm. Warm.

Sure enough, as we climbed, the new snow went from not quite an inch to ... a few inches. Over re-freezing-but-not-frozen snow. Interesting. OK, up high we did find maybe 6-8" in open areas. Once that potato mash underneath freezes, we should finally have really solid cover over the majority of hidden obstacles.

We decided that since it didn't look like a big yo-yo day, we'd make it slightly more tour oriented, and we farted around on a high ridge a bit finding some new lines to descend from that allowed us to connect sub-alpine meadow to sub-alpine meadow for perhaps 1500 vf. Not much new snow to slide, and it seemed well bonded and not slabby on our aspect, and the old snow seemed frozen enough not to worry over. The snow in the woods was mostly icy chunky stuff with a dusting on top - yummy! Fortunately we did well on connecting the meadows. Not may style points as everyone tended toward wide turns to avoid running afoul of the crusty potatos beneath the powder, but it was fun in a wobbly sort of way. Down lower, the name of the game became survival style exit skiing yet once again this season.

Two more feet will be nice up there (ten more would be transformational).

All in all, another nice day out with great folks and a day out on potato mash beats another day home doing chores. We were home around dark thanks to the lack of yo-yoing and the nice short drive.

Other TAY-ers are welcome to add to the story if they're willing to admit to skiing with me  ;).