Home > Trip Reports > March 25, 2007, Lichtenburg 5844' Mc Causland 5747'

March 25, 2007, Lichtenburg 5844' Mc Causland 5747'

3/25/07
WA Stevens Pass
2884
6
Posted by John Morrow on 3/25/07 2:16pm
This is a fun loop tour that can be done either from Smithbrook or Yodelin.  Mostly intermediate terrain for us tele mortals, that includes two mountains, three different runs, and great scenery.  We started today from the Yodelin Lodge.
Quick and dirty snow report:
North aspects, 5800 ft. to 5000 ft. good 10 inches of Cascade powder (much the same as Motsies report).
                     5000 ft. to 4500 ft. getting heavy but with clear cold nights could lighten without crust forming.
South aspects, 5400 ft. to 4500 ft. rapidly wettening new, 4 to 6 inches, probably will crust with the predicted weather,         
                     transitioning to somewhat firm rainsoaked snow which acted like large grain corn down to 3800 ft.
Long report: from Yodelin we toured into the valley west and then up the big south slope of Lichtenburg.  We predicted to find some new snow well bonded  to the rain soaked old snow, which seems to be nearly isothermal at this point on the south aspect.  This slope is big and open enough that I would choose the Smithbrook approach in most midwinter conditions, today it was safe.  From the top of Lichtenburg we dropped into the north side and skied nice new snow down to Smithbrook.  Then it was up the east slope of McCausland to its' top.  A great north slope run goes for close to 1000 vertical down to Dow Lake.  We skinned back out and across to Valhalla saddle, traversed over to Lichtenburg's south side, and skied the heavy, sun affected new (without sinking really into the old rain soaked snow), until it became corn like near the bottom.  And back out Yodelin.  What I like about this tour is that of the 4200 vertical feet of climbing, probably 3500 feet of it was actually making turns.  Not a whole lot of lateral touring. 
Smithbrook approach, though, would have more road skiing but makes an equally fun tour.  A way out of Dow lake I scoped today (for a Smithbrook return) would be to skin north,then east, from the lake to the high point on the Smithbrook divide, and then ski glades back to the hairpin switchback of the Smithbrook road for the third run.  This passes east of and below Union Gap.  Hope I am not giving too much away, in the way of "private" stashes.  I apologize to Mike at Stevens Nordic if I did.  He is the only person I've ever met to also have done this loop.  But it really isn't the steep stuff, or big long runs alot of TAY'ers like. 
Thanks to Pico and Swooz for being such enthusiastic partners for their first trip out of Yodelin.
If any are worth it I will post a couple of pics tomorrow.
Anybody ski anything out of Snoqualmie today?  Telemetry shows alot less snow but I would like to stay closer to home tomorrow. Thanks.

Nice report.

Snoqualmie had a fun mix today. UP close to 5K and above, some nice fluffy powder pockets could be found. From 4-5K-ish, powder on top of nice turning carvable corn/slush, and below that, fun but getting more slushy and heavy. Anything in deep forest was pretty rough (and hard  up high - yum!). Open areas were the name of the game and surprised us at how fun the skiing was - we had to lap the stuff in the powder/corn zone.

A few photos.  I still can not figure out how to reduce the size without it getting blurry and tiny to meet the size restrictions, so these will most likely be boring.  I also do not know how to put photos within the text itself?  Here goes anyway:
Photo 1 is Pico dropping in from the summit of Lichtenburg.
Photo 2 is Jim skiing to Dow Lake.
Photo 3 is Pico on the south side of Lichtenburg on our way out.
Wish I could increase the acutal dimensions on the screen and still reduce the KB size but I can't figure it out!

John, this sounds like a great trip! We were admiring the south side of Lichtenberg from Heather Ridge last Wed (there's a photo here).

For photos I have some suggestions that might help. I'm assuming that you have photo editing software of some kind. You say, "I still can not figure out how to reduce the size without it getting blurry and tiny". I'm assuming that you are starting from a fairly high resolution (eg. big pixel dimensions) photo, and so you have to downsize it ("re-sample") before posting. Whenever you downsize a photo, you should then do a sharpening step afterwards - "unsharp mask" is the best way if you have it. This helps recover the sharpness of the original.

Another trick that works well when starting from high resolution photos and going toward low resolution (eg. the 800 pixel limit for posting here) is "zoom by cropping". Instead of just downsizing the entire original photo, in which the skier or other features of interest might be small, first crop the photo into the desired composition (this is effectively a "digital zoom", but without the loss of quality that happens with the camera's digital zoom). Then downsize and do a sharpening step. I used this "zoom by cropping" for a lot of the photos on TAY home page right now.

Once you've got your photos downsized, when you save them as jpegs you can choose the amount of compression and thus the size of the jpeg file. My photo editor shows the final jpeg file size in the compression dialogue window so it's easy to achieve a particular file size. For a typical skiing 800x600 jpeg it is usually not hard to get below 100kb unless there are a lot of trees in the photo (fine details don't compress as well).

You are right about inserting photos within the text, if the photos are uploaded to TRs server they all automatically display at the bottom of the text. If they are located on a different server, then the photos can be made to appear where ever you want within the text using the "img" tag.

I have an idea about overcoming this limitation with TRs server photos but haven't gotten it all worked out:

This is one of your photos that I inserted by using its URL in an "img" tag. I will explore this more.

Nice TR. Thanks for posting it.

Mt. McCausland is named for my wife's great uncle Norm McCausland (Seattle cartoonist Bob McCausland's brother). We hiked up there a couple of years ago in the summer and I have been interested in skiing in the area.

Let me know if you are planning the tour again and want someone to help break trail, we'd love to tag along with someone posessed of a better knowledge of the area. Of course, we need enough notice to head up from Portland...





Thanks for the comments, folks.


author=Jason B link=topic=6583.msg26977#msg26977 date=1174953901]


Mt. McCausland is named for my wife's great uncle Norm McCausland (Seattle cartoonist Bob McCausland's brother). We hiked up there a couple of years ago in the summer and I have been interested in skiing in the area.



Jason, I appreciate the info.  Some of us have wondered about the name origin since it is only labelled on some of the maps we've seen.  Larry_R does great 360 degree panoramics and researches and labels an amazing number of mountains.  He has one from McCausland, in fact. 
Since I come from Roslyn I usually only get into the Smithbrook area once a winter, but will give you a heads up if headed that way before the season ends.

I appreciate the suggestions, Charles.  I'll work through them to see if I can figure it out.  I am behind the curve on computer stuff but am happy to report that I just figured out how to add a quote to a response!

John

Hmm. I don't really know much about Norm, but I'll try to find out more and post it. Either that or I'll pm you an email address of someone who would know more.

I haven't been up in the area since November, but it looks like it all holds snow better than Mt. Hood.  :)

We'll have to check out the route you took.

Apparently, you can read about Norm McCausland in the summit register, but you might also check with the Skykomish Historical Society.

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march-25-2007-lichtenburg-5844-mc-causland-5747
John Morrow
2007-03-25 21:16:33