January 18, 2003, Mount Saint Helens

Spent the night at the TH on Friday, and awoke around 6am at the Marble Mountain Sno-Park. Only a few other cars there, so we left around 7am and headed up the mountain. My wife alison does not really like backcountry skiing as she grew up skiing groomed runs at alpental.

For some reason she wanted to try this again as we did it last year as well. The weather was incredible the whole day, as we were skinning up in t shirts and sweating. We reached the summit around 1pm and were able to take in the views on a warm and wind free summit. The skiing from the summit down to about 7000 feet was good snow with real icy patches here and there. But the middle section of the mountain was awesome (5000-7000 feet) It was 3 inches of mashed potatoes on a hard crust. I was able to get fresh tracks here and there alongside the hiking route. Even on the way down we did not run into that many people - maybe 30 folks all day long. Now the lower portion of the route just plain sucked. The last 2 times I have skied down the worm flows route, the last 2 miles or so in the trees was either way slow slushy snow, or just right. But not today - It was pure ice, solid as a rock. And with the snowshoe path a foot deep, it created an element to our ski down that was uncomparable to anything else. Needless to say, I fell down 3-4 times on this hard packed ice layer and jumbled my cranium a few times. We finally made it back down to the car around 5pm as we ran into some friends that were camping on the mountain around the 4000 foot mark, so we chatted for awhile.
Wish I had images to show, but alas - no one has found my camera on by hidden peak still!