June 25-26, 2003, Mt Rainier, Emmons Glacier

tried to take advantage of the nice weather for my first ski of the emmons...skinned from where the trails gets close to the river, at the bottom of glacier basin; got prime tent spots at shurman; started around 6am, under brilliantly sunny skies, not a shred of cloud...and 20 mins later my partner has to turn around due to bad knee pain :( since conditions were bomber decided to proceed on my own, turned around at 13,500 at a sketchy crevasse crosssing.

survival skiing down to about 11500, had to resort to parallel turns on my tele gear to fight the frozen sastrugi. nice smooth corn from there to shurman but had to traverse often in order to avoid crevasses.

crashed for an hour in the tent, then packed and scrambled the couple hundred feet to top of steamboat prow...could see my tracks on the lower emmons in full glory, nice feeling!

good snow on the upper interglacier that i could not do justice to, couldn't manage more than 6 turns before stopping and resting...BADLY runneled lower down and all thru the basin but we managed to ski down to the trail, where we happily changed into running shoes...though carrying packs, skis and very wet boots from the river crossing was definitely type B fun.

all in all, i'd say the emmons is a great ski, the pitch is quite nice and sustained, but would be much more fun if not doing it alone and worrying about the very slim margin of error this entails.