January 18, 2003, Snow Lake Trail

With the high freezing levels and mostly sunny reports, 4 of us headed out for snoqualmie pass to either ski the northern aspects above Snow Lake or the southern slopes below Chair Peak.  Although, the entire cascade mountian range was receiving sun, we found the usual winter cloud cover over snoqualmie pass.  The bobsled track makes it easy to reach source lake.  After an hour or so of beacon practise, we headed above source lake to either yoyo runs down the other side of the ridge ot snow lake or go straight up to the col at Chair Peak.  The cloud cover kept this area pretty cold and the snow had a breakable sun crust with a half a foot of snow underneath before the other thick crust layer.  We heard that the cloud layer dissipated around 5000 feet, so we decided to go to Chair Peak.  After avoiding some cliffs we finally got onto a skin track in the right direction.  By now, the snow we were on was getting harder so we decided it would be better to ski this now and not wait.  I kinda ventured by myself up to the ridge because I had to see above these clouds.  I finally got above them and found very interesting things.  Soft powdery snow, with lots of surface hoar, some natural wet slides were occuring below the rocks, and it was probably 20-30 degrees warmer.  It was cool to be above the clouds as they flowed through the pass sorta like a waterfall.  The few hundred feet in the sun was the only skiable terrain I found.  Once in the clouds, it was survival skiing at its best.  It was difficult to not catch an edge with every turn until one was back to the boblsed.

joshua