February 22, 2003, Tye Lake
2/22/03
2283
1
Finally, it really felt and looked like winter yesterday! Led a small Mountaineers group into Tye Lake basin Saturday. N. Parking lot was getting full at the ski area by 8:30, should have been a zoo at the lifts... Deep and dry powder with new snow most of the day. Skied the trees in the basin behind Skyline Ridge and climbed toward the Tye Lake ridge. Much more evidence of windloading on the E. side of this second saddle.
We picked our way through the trees to the bench and did a rutschblock at 5100' with N-NW aspect. It scored a messy 5, but with a good quality sheer plane at ~18" depth. Looking at the profile there was increasing snow density to this plane which was just a bit firmer (1-2 finger density and only about an inch thick). The group surmised that this was likely the hoar frost layer from our previous sunny spell. Below this layer there was again increasing density to the rain crust some 4-5 feet deep at this spot with no other really distinctive layers observed. With these test results we stayed in the trees and low angle open slopes to the lakes. We did one more lap in Tye Lake basin before heading back toward the cars.
Overall an excellent day with OK visibility and great quality snow. The ski down Heather ridge was really nice. Only the last 300' was chunky. Oh yeah, and the road near the outbuildings at the bottom was littered with more yahoos than usual: picknickers, campers, people staring off into space, dog crap, all right smack in the middle of the snow covered road. So you might want to take extra care as we had to make some crazed acrobatic snowplow maneuvers to keep from creaming some poor, clueless (but apologetic and friendly) folks.
Hope there is more snow like this in our future. Cold temps should hold the goods up there for a while.
-Tom
We picked our way through the trees to the bench and did a rutschblock at 5100' with N-NW aspect. It scored a messy 5, but with a good quality sheer plane at ~18" depth. Looking at the profile there was increasing snow density to this plane which was just a bit firmer (1-2 finger density and only about an inch thick). The group surmised that this was likely the hoar frost layer from our previous sunny spell. Below this layer there was again increasing density to the rain crust some 4-5 feet deep at this spot with no other really distinctive layers observed. With these test results we stayed in the trees and low angle open slopes to the lakes. We did one more lap in Tye Lake basin before heading back toward the cars.
Overall an excellent day with OK visibility and great quality snow. The ski down Heather ridge was really nice. Only the last 300' was chunky. Oh yeah, and the road near the outbuildings at the bottom was littered with more yahoos than usual: picknickers, campers, people staring off into space, dog crap, all right smack in the middle of the snow covered road. So you might want to take extra care as we had to make some crazed acrobatic snowplow maneuvers to keep from creaming some poor, clueless (but apologetic and friendly) folks.
Hope there is more snow like this in our future. Cold temps should hold the goods up there for a while.
-Tom