December 2, 2006, Mount Catherine, Snoqualmie Pass

Thanks to Jim for taking me up and filling in this hole in my Snoqualmie geography.  We left the parking lot around 7:45 and ascended the nicely groomed road to the nordic trail system, and then crossed Mill Creek and started up.  Jim guided skillfully and we ended up topping out just east of the true summit.  Good and cold and windy on top with great views.  The descent was limited by my ski skills and a bit by low cover, but it was still a lot of fun.  We found a steepish gulley near the summit that was good for a few turns, and then the lower angle old growth provided some good areas.  On the way back to the Mill Creek clear cut we found what we think is a carnivore's stash of a dead animal in a hole in the snow.  Whatever the stashing animal was, it had great routefinding skills over a creeky flat area.  A final climb up Mt. Hyak lead us to a lot of people having fun on boards and skiis.  The front side of Hyak was getting pretty chopped up and there was a cuttable crust on top of an avereage sinkage of 4 inches of lighter stuff; strictly OK.  Each traveler left solid ruts of passage.

The snow conditions were amazing, esp. in the backcountry.  The coverage seemed comfortably safe but did restrict bombing down; lots of horizontal stretcher trees still.  I would estimate that getting through Nordic Pass would be OK.  I'm not up on snow science vocab., but we did skier cuts without results.  There's not a lot of steep stuff to inspect, but we saw little sign of spontaneous activity.  There was some surface hoar but the warm up should destroy that.  The snow was significantly solider than last week and breaking trail was much less work.