March 3, 2006, HM Jackson Wilderness Loop, Stevens

Maybe too late to help with planning for tomorrow...

This was a tour that I'd wanted to do for several years, and the snow conditions seemed to warrant trying it now. Plus, long-lost ski partner David reappeared and seemed interested in my type of ski tours using waxless skis. Maybe I didn't read the forecast correctly, but an expected cloudy day turned out to be full on sun and blue sky the whole day. The east wind was really blowing in the morning, with big plumes of snow coming off all of the higher Skykomish valley peaks (Index/Persis, Gunn/Merchant/Baring), but it wasn't much of an issue where we were in the morning, and seemed to largely die down by afternoon.

We parked at Stevens lower lot (Yodelin), crossed Hwy 2, skied to the end of the cabins road, then up Nason Creek. When it got steeper we had to put on skins, and skied northwest up to a meadow, then climbed to a saddle leading into the Martin Creek drainage. Mostly traversing on sunny slopes of upper Martin Creek led to another saddle near Valhalla Mountain. We skied down the north side of this into a tributary valley of Rapid River - very nice turns on the shaded north-facing slopes. We then traversed north and then northeast quite a ways on the east side of the Rapid River valley, staying 400-500 feet above the valley floor. Forest just like around Nordic Pass, except 100s (1000s?) of times greater in area - beautiful. Eventually we came to a tributary of Rapid River which comes down from around Union Gap, and we generally followed this southeast to reach Union Gap (had to use skins again to climb this). Skins off and then mostly traversing southwest near the route of PCT to the saddle above Lake Valhalla (between Lichtenberg Montain and "Mt. McCausland") - had to use skins again for the last few hundred feet because sun-affected snow was refreezing. The slopes on the east side of Lake Valhalla were still in the sun, so we pulled the skins and zoomed on a descending traverse across under the west face of Lichtenberg. The final descent on south-facing slopes to Nason Creek was pretty bad - sun exposed and now re-freezing. We'd get a few good turns and then hit bad breakable crust overlying 20" of rotten snow - must have been everything above the last significant crust. Back on the shaded areas along Nason Creek the snow was still as good as it had been in the morning.

Turns? We didn't get that many turns, but the characterization would be pretty much along the lines of Rich_B's report from Wednesday: if the snow doesn't get any sun, there are probably good turns to be had. Otherwise, you take your chances.