Feb 25, Snoqualmie Pass environs

With the heavy new snow, we set our uptrack mindfully, both from the perspective of avoiding risk exposure as well as to give us a downtrack in some of the lower angled portions of the tour. We encountered snowball snow below about 4K, and a variety of snow conditions above there depending on forest cover and wind effects, but pretty much all soft snow of one sort or another except in the most sun-exposed locations which had a noticeable crust not far under the surface. The tree bombs were just starting to fall by mid-day as we approached our high point. The snow had also gotten noticeably more dry  and lighter (light being a relative term) above 4500. The snow felt funky while breaking just barely over the west side of the crest around 5500 - the surface was rather slabby with lighter layers beneath. Cracks kept forming between my skis, but none propagated beyond my skis. I tried jump-testing a few huge snow mushroom formations (nice unsupported snow to test - something I learned watching and talking with a guide in Canada) and other steep rollovers over on our preferred descent aspect, and only one had snow move, in that case w/o a clean bed surface. So the snow was feeling potentially funky for avy in terms of slab consistency, but so far, wasn't showing much of a tendency to actually go sliding even when not well supported.

So at our high point, we decided to cautiously work our way onto some treed west-facing terrain that is generally a good deal steeper than our ascent route - in the 20-30 degree range. We took turns watching each other do ski cuts and short 5-turn drops as we built our confidence in the snowpack. We continued skiing with good protocol - taking it one at a time and skiing to islands of safety and watching each other, but otherwise started to let 'er rip. FUN! Despite the heavy new snow, we got many bouncy porpoising turns in. From the bottom of that first run, we had another 20-30 minutes of trailbreaking to get back to our uptrack, but it was so worth it. We climbed back to the high point of the tour for a second run down the light snow up high, which was just as fun as the first. We judiciously aimed for our uptrack at key points to avoid hopelessly wallowing one the flats with locked heels, but it was still tiring skiing as we dropped further into the wet snow zone where long "logs" of snow would sometimes form in front of our legs, extending out well past our ski tips. Despite the heavy snow, we still found fun turning to within a few feet of the highway. It was the sort of day where us mere mortals could take suprisingly steep, tight lines and just kind of wiggle through the obstacles with half-turns often being adequate to check the speed.