April 26, 2003, Silver Star, North Cascades

Jim and I finally made our way to highway 20.  We approached silver star via the silver star creek.  The steep/icy forest made for some interesting skinning.  It took two hours to get out of the forest.  We found stable snow conditions on the entire traverse to the glacier even though there was extremely warm temps.  As we approached the two rock buttresses that separates the bottom of the silver star glacier, the wind really picked up making things pretty difficult.  The tracks we were following split up here.  It looked like the party ahead of us went halfway up the middle shoot and then turned around and then went all the way up the left shoot.  We opted to go for the left one.  Once we got in it, we noticed lots of wind loading.  Snow tests revealed an 18" hard slab that slid with a shovel shear test.  Both of us did not really think the shoot will slide, but we decided it was not worth the risk.  So we went down back to our tracks and decided to go half way up the middle one.  From there we skiid continuously until the last 1000 feet where walking proved to be the quicker travel.  We had great turns up high, however a crust formed lower down, therefore survival skiing was in order.

The next morning, we met up with ski-photomatt et al. at the blue lake trailhead for the sally portman b-day tour.

joshua