September 11, Sherman Peak, Talum face

I knew I had to ski this face after spying it from the Boulder Creek bridge several weeks ago. Studying the face from the bridge, there appeared to be only one thin meandering line down the massively broken Talum glacier, I tried to memorize it, making note of obvious features.
Using the Squak approach seemed to make the most sense. The approach trail was beautiful, winding through old growth forest, and lush riparian creek areas. I veered off the trail onto a dry creek bed, not knowing that a climbers trail existed. I switched to boots and pons well below cragview and considered my ascention choices. The Talum would require a traverse over broken glacier, and was quite broken itself, the Squak appeared very broken, but in hindsight I should have taken that as there was a thin clean line up the Squak, but this line was narrow meandering, and surrounded on all sides by gaping crevasses, holes, and glacial jumble, and I did not want to get too tricky with crevasses on the way up. I decided the Easton would likely offer an easier way up based upon its timid reputation. I hiked up and traversed over to the Easton. The lower glacier had only a few cracks here and there, but at ~8k was a line of monstrous crevasses which spanned the entire glacier. I took what I considered a reasonable route in an attempt to navigate this mess, but after several bridges and hops, I dead ended on some island in the crevasses and I had to backtrack and descend. It went like this for some time, with several dead ends. I had been traversing and was on the Deming, only a couple hundred feet from the cleaver which separates it from the Coleman, just when frustration was peaking I spotted decaying features of a section of boot pack up through the crevasses, I took this and after some zigzagging and more bridges, was through the cracks. I can't believe how close I was to the summit of Sherman the whole time! I reached a col to the looker€™s right of the crater, and hiked the lohssy ridge to the summit of Sherman. I had concerns that I would find glacial ice as I did a couple weeks ago on the Park Headwall, and from my viewpoint on the summit, I could not tell, the very top of the Talum was covered in lohss. I accessed the snow by downclilmbing some steep sketchy choss, then traversed a little ice. I found beautiful soft corn! clicked on the skis about 15' below the rocky summit, and skied good snow with very mild sun cups down past crevasses, trying to remember the route through. There were huge crevasses everywhere, I skied over multiple bridges and cracks, but was able to find my way on descent to good snow for the upper half of the face. Halfway down the slope steepened, and became strewn with moderate runnels, but there was one narrow corridor of good corn between the runnelled face, then a little gully where things really smoothed out, except for numerous sun induced rock craters, but these were easily skied around and kind of fun, then cruiser snow on the lower glacier all the way down to 6200. I couldn't resist skiing the fall line down the lower glacier, even though it meant 1k of climbing to get above the sulfide moraine so I could traverse out onto the Squak. Then another 1k of good skiing down the lower Squak. A climbers trail! Back to the truck at about 7, 10 1/2 hour round trip, made considerably longer than necessary by lousy route finding.