January 8, 2006, Camp Muir

I woke on Sunday morning and decided I wanted to see what the Muir snowfield looked like after all the new precipitation.  So I jumped in the car and headed out.  When I arrived at the entrance at 9:30am I was informed the gate had just opened, so far so good.  

After leaving Paradise I plowed through 8" of snow for a short period before gladly turning over trail breaking to a faster group.  In short order we arrived below Pan Point where the other group headed towards Edith Basin.  I decided to skin up Pan face despite the wind affected layer on top.  As other reports have indicated the layers below appeared good.  I skinned through the Pan Point rolls, keeping just to the east side of the final bit near the top.  More light wind slab at that point but not excessively stiff.

Above pan point the wind was fairly light, 10 to 15mph, poor visibility with clouds streaming over from the west.  I continued on up, staying above pebble creek on the way to the snowfield.   Shortly after starting up the snowfield the wind calmed to about 5 to 15mph and the fog/clouds cleared off.  From there I made a beeline to Muir with only one short period of fog, otherwise generally clear.  The mountain was well plastered with snow, almost no rock showing, even Cathedral rock was mostly white.  The snowfield itself looks much different compared to December, only one rock island left in the "middle".  

At Muir the buildings had significant accumulations of rime with odd spiraled patterns.  The helicopter(?) pad is about 2.5' from being buried, back in December I don't think the snow even reached its base.

After a quick look round I ripped off my skins and headed straight down.  The clearing held to about 8500', then a white-out all the way to below Pan Point.  I used the GPS a couple of times to make sure I was on route. The skiing was good when I could see :) about 3" to 6" of fairly light snow on top of a skiable wind packed base, below Pan it was deeper and somewhat dense, but nice.