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Topic: December 2, 2006 Mount Catherine, Snoqualmie Pass (Read 2039 times)
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dkoelle
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Posts: 251
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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.
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gregL
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Posts: 1109
WWW
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Hey, sorry to miss you, Ron! We followed your skintrack freeway for a while, then veered off and went around Catherine to Silver Peak. Kinda heavy windpack up there and really cold on the ridge, but a beautiful day with lots of mellow skinning mileage. Here's Kevin on the west ridge of Silver Peak as we relaxed for a total of about 30 seconds in the 45 mph wind before skiing down:
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md2020
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Posts: 378
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four of us climbed up Mt Catherine by way of Nordic Pass thinking we might be the first up there this season. Just north of the summit we discovered a set of ski tracks that just managed to beat us for first tracks down through the trees - must have belonged to dkoelle and company. If we'd been any slower even Ron Jarvis and crew would have beat us. The ski down through the trees was a bit tight and bumpy, but the snow was excellent. A foot or two of new will really smooth things out. We skied back the way we came towards Radio Tower hill and Grand Junction where we ran into Robi. We then skied below the still closed Silver Fir lift to the car.
Brenda and I returned Sunday for some yo-yoing in the trees below the radio tower. Skiing was much better here than on Catherine - much smoother and fewer small trees.
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Mike Metz
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Swooz
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Posts: 67
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Thanks David, for giving me the call Friday night and for the good company on the trip. It sure was a lot easier going than my attempt the week before. Too bad our early start kept us from meeting some fellow TAY'ers. I was wondering if any of the pictures turned out?
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dkoelle
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Posts: 251
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My first ever attempt to post pictures...a miserable failure! And the 100 kb versions I made with a free jpg compressor look miserable on my monitor.
For now, see Flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/koelle/ has a few photos of Mt. Catherine. Time to learn some basic WWW-ology. David
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« Last Edit: 12/05/06, 08:41 AM by dkoelle »
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), but did get photographic evidence that we made it to the top 
:
