5/2/2018, Swauth
5/2/18
1810
1
Made a quick trip up to the swauth today hoping to find corn, instead found refrozen isothermal snow that was poorly bonded to itself with a thin frozen crust on top. The snow was bad for skinning, bad for booting, bad for skiing, and based on some of the crowns we saw on the south faces up high, bad for sticking to itself. We were able to start skinning a few switch backs below the log landing with a little skis on/skis off, so a decent amount of walking is required.
yeah I slept at around 6K from the 1st to the 2nd of May... central/N. Cascades.
May 1st was a swirling drizzly fog of a day with fairly uniform mushy isothermic snow on most slopes (about half a foot or more new from the weekend).
Really cold that night with everything frozen in the morning... put on ski crampons and switched to booting on steeper slopes. Variably supportable crust. By 9:30am S/E slopes were cooked with cornices dripping and crumbling, while the other northern side was scary frozen... throw in some recent evidence of step down fractures(saw some up on Whitehorse too on the way back)... left limited travel options in variable terrain that day.
beautiful night out tho
May 1st was a swirling drizzly fog of a day with fairly uniform mushy isothermic snow on most slopes (about half a foot or more new from the weekend).
Really cold that night with everything frozen in the morning... put on ski crampons and switched to booting on steeper slopes. Variably supportable crust. By 9:30am S/E slopes were cooked with cornices dripping and crumbling, while the other northern side was scary frozen... throw in some recent evidence of step down fractures(saw some up on Whitehorse too on the way back)... left limited travel options in variable terrain that day.
beautiful night out tho
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