May 21, 2007, Mazama Ridge, Mt. Rainier

I was supposed to ride my motorcycle to eastern Oregon today to go flyfishing, but 7 inches of new last night, 3 more promised today (down to 3,000 ft asl), and forecasts for damaging 45 mph E_W winds in E Wa/OR said maybe you should stay local.  So I took my newish Salomon SNS-BC outfit up to Paradise.  Lightly snowing. Walked down the Paradise Valley Road (still closed to riff-raff, but in regular use by volunteers and NPS types) and skied up to the back bowl.  A good 7"+ of freshly poured cement over what seemed  bottomless water saturated old snow.  Snow bridges over the Paradise River are starting to fall apart, seemed like 40% more of running water was showing since late last week.  Nice ski, all by myself, but really not too much turning coming down; turns made deep trenches.  Decided not to cross snowbridges again (had to cross 2--only one last week), and went down to 4th crossing.  Nice cliff. Headed down parallel to the road to where the next creek comes in and found an easy way down.  On the way out, encountered a friendly SCA crew including Rachel :D who were marking off all the access points off Paradise Valley Road as closed with orange netting.  the Park decided they wanted all off-road travelers to leave from Paradise and follow the summer trail routes across the wet-avalanche prone slopes and across the bridge!!!! across the Paradise River (I wouldn't have the nerve to even try that given the snow depth and mushiness).  Oh well ...