April 2, 2018 Parachute-Summit Central

I was up at 5:30am with the thought of where to go skiing. Snoqualmie Pass had a couple of crashes and would open at 8am. Stevens will have a short highway closure around 8am, but has some breezy winds. Crystal sounds good, but I did not want to drive for 2 hours both ways. A friend was already driving to meet another friend at Stevens with a 2-hour drive both ways, so I emailed Robie and I'll see him at Central. OK, decision made.

I mentioned to Jill that I'm leaving for Central and I'll be back after noon. She said " if you'll wait for 15 minutes and I'll get my ski stuff and go with you". I asked "do you really want to go skiing today?" "Yeah". Great! I put the skis in the Subaru, made her coffee and a Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuit. It was an easy drive to Central, the Silver Fir parking lot was not plowed much, so we parked near the Central lift on the road. We arrived at 9am and I was amazed the lift had vary few riders. Yes, 10"of powder. Skiing untracked lines was fun as long as you skied the steeper lines. It was so deep that on the shallower runs Jill would be stopped in her tracks. It was fun watching skiers and boarders moving quickly in untracked powder. I noticed the Triple 60 chair had not been running for the first hour. Then I noticed 2 ski patrollers on the lift and there were about 10 full chairs ahead of us. WOW, they were setting down the first tracks on Triple 60, but Parachute only had 2 tracks.

Soooo... Parachute was mostly untracked and steep. It has been 7-8 years since we skied this line - before my stroke back in February 2012 and Jill's first hip replacement. It was a great run and in April, no less. By the time we got to the base, the masses had arrived and it didn't take them long to cut up the slope at Parachute. All in all, a nice powder morning.

Nice! We were slugabeds and had some stuff to deal with before driving up but were still getting some great skiing in through early afternoon and just really really nice skiing after that (with some attention to tree shade and compass aspect). There was a brief funkified run or two around 2:00 and then we shifted to sun exposures which had softened to the top, until we had to leave at around 3:30.

Based on the 9-15 turn stretches of the fresh snow with adequate steepness for fun turns I was finding for a few hours I would imagine that run on Parachute was pretty stellar!!

Sorry I missed you guys , We were on a mission to Hyak . First run of 12" powder down the backside quickly morphed over 3 more runs into heavy Cascade Chowder. Bout 15 skiers over that way.

After bagging 1st chair, I followed the crowd from Silver Fir -> Central -> Triple60, finding plenty of freshies along the way. Sauntered back by noon when things started to get heavy and took a friend up on a great afternoon opportunity. Not looking forward to tomorrow's rain :'(