Feb 16, Red Mountain
2/15/06
WA Snoqualmie Pass
2547
1
Pete A and I left the Snoqualmie parking lot at around 930 am and returned just about 5 hours later... During those 5 hours we encountered lots of ice, some light powdery substances, and breakable crust, and that was before we even reached the base of Red. The W face of Red had about 5-8 inches of pretty light snow on top of sheet ice, which made skinning up it pretty hard. So we decided to boot pack the last, oh... 900 vf. Skiing down the face was great, once you got enough speed to plane and your skis stopped encountering the ice. Slow turns, however, resulted in power skidding, yuck.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19315459@N00/show/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19315459@N00/show/
just wanted to add the following.
the crust under the new snow was firm under skis but could easily be kicked through while booting up.
although the new snow on most of the west face was unconsolidated, the last 50-75ft to the top was wind-effected and had a shallow slab that had formed...below that the snow sloughed easily but was not slabby at all.
Wax your boards with cold wax this weekend...I think the last little bits of my all-temp wax job was scraped fairly clean from the weekend corn in the nisqually chutes...cause my skis were very grabby in the new snow.
tap test on the west face showed the new snow was unconsolidated and I did get a relatively clean shear about 2ft down after 10 wrist taps, 10 elbow taps, 10 from the shoulder, and then a few 'beat the tar outta my shovel' hits....all in all fairly stable :)
the crust under the new snow was firm under skis but could easily be kicked through while booting up.
although the new snow on most of the west face was unconsolidated, the last 50-75ft to the top was wind-effected and had a shallow slab that had formed...below that the snow sloughed easily but was not slabby at all.
Wax your boards with cold wax this weekend...I think the last little bits of my all-temp wax job was scraped fairly clean from the weekend corn in the nisqually chutes...cause my skis were very grabby in the new snow.
tap test on the west face showed the new snow was unconsolidated and I did get a relatively clean shear about 2ft down after 10 wrist taps, 10 elbow taps, 10 from the shoulder, and then a few 'beat the tar outta my shovel' hits....all in all fairly stable :)
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