May 10, White Salmon Glacier and Shuksan circumnav

Since the weather hadn't been cooperating as we were hoping on the week-ends, I decided to take a day off during the week since forecast was good for the middle of the week. It took less then 10 seconds on the phone to get Greg excited about the trip and about the same amount of time to get Magali, Fleur and Etienne to say they would come as well. The circumnavigation of Shuksan is something I had been wanting to do for a long time. Staci's report from last week got me even more excited as I somehow hadn;t considered doing this over the White Salmon glacier.
We started around 7:15 am from the lower Mt Baker parking lot on the forest road towards chair 8, dropped a little altitude at the end of the trail and stayed arounf 3400-3500 feet up to the end of the valley. The head of the valley had beeen swiped by avalanches from all directions, but with the freezing in the last couple of days things looked good and we skinned up towards Winnie's slide at first on a very hard snow pack. Around 5000 -5500 feet the snow got deeper - this was last Saturday's snowfall with important accumulations on some aspects (well over a foot of unconsolidated snow). We booted up the ridegeline on one of the steeper slopes following the tracks of a climber who had made the ascent the day before.
At Winnie's slide, Magali, Fleur and Etienne decided to stay back and Greg and I continued up. We arrived at the top of Hell's highway about an hour and a half later. We decided to not go up the Summit pyramid and do the circumnav. When we arrived at the col, above what we thought to be the hanging glacier, we started skiing down and after a couple of turns I looked at Greg  and said: "man this is A LOT steeper then what I thought this was going to be" and Greg nodded. Quickly we realized that we were actually on the Price glacier  ;D. We skinned back a few hundred yards and then dropped in on the right col, to the hanging glacier where we had some great open slopes with great corn snow. Ski down was great all the way to 5000 feet or so where the snow was getting really heavy.

This was a really great tour - I expect the conditions will be pretty good to get to the head of the valley for at least another 2 weeks (depending on temperature), I definitely wouldn't want to go back without snow on that section....

Pictures to be posted.