July 15, 2006, Nisqually Chute, Mt Rainier -almost
7/15/06
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
2266
1
My son Zach and I had plans to ski the Nisqually Chute, a reprise of a very nice trip there 3 weeks ago. There were lots of low clouds when we arrived, so we couldn't get a view of the chute from either the bridge or the parking lot. We climbed up in shifting low clouds with rare sunbreaks and never got a real view of our destination on the way up. We started skinning about halfway to Pan Point, took off the skis at the base of Pan Point, carried to Pebble Creek, and started skinning again there. Snow down low was moderately cupped. We popped out of the clouds at about 8500 feet - nice views of the mountain and over the cloud deck to Adams and Hood. We climbed to a bit over 9000 and headed for the chute entrance. What a shock - the top was completely melted out! I scrambled down and right about 100ft to reach snow that was thin, but reasonably ski-able. But I could see another interruption about 200 feet down. The visibility was poor enough that I couldn't see how long or steep the down-climb was or if there were more interruptions to follow. With heavy hearts we headed back down the snowfield. We poked around in a couple of the lower Nisqually Chutes, but none of them would go. So we patch-skied down to below Pebble Creek, down-climbed Pan Point, and found reasonably good patches to connect most of the way down (followed Dead Horse Creek to where it first goes under the asphalt trail). The lower mountain had cleared up, but the cloud band stuck between 7000 and 8500 feet, so we never saw the upper part of the main chute. The bottom part looked very much diminished from 3 weeks ago, but still in reasonably good shape. Can't tell you anything more about the upper part. Still a pretty good day overall. Both this weekend (at Paradise) and last weekend (at Sunrise) I've been surprised by the rapid melting over the last few weeks.
You probably made the right call. My brother and I skied the chutes on July 8, and things were getting pretty thin. We had to carry over some rocks to enter the chutes. We also had to dodge a couple crevasses lower down. We had a fun time, but it was definitely getting late in the season.
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