July 20, 2003, Glacier Peak, S snowfields/Sitkum

After having some Rainier plans aborted early Saturday (giving me some extra sleep after getting home from work at 4am Saturday morning), Sky called me with some interesting Glacier Peak ideas.  Right away I said I was in.  The three of us (our friend Jeff was also game - he seems to enjoy the special kind of pain you can only get on a trip to the G-spot) met at Sky's around 5 and headed out shortly after.  Started hiking at around 8pm on Saturday and made camp in the middle/upper part of Boulder Basin around 12-12:30.  Jeff was ahead of Sky and I and had gone higher to a different bivy site.  We didn't know where he was until he signaled to us with his headlamp from above, but we already had our bivy set up and figured we'd meet up in the morning.  Upon waking up, we could see that our "perfect" weather forcast was not to be, with some clouds coming in from the west.  Soon, much of the mountain was enveloped in a cloud bank which we eventually climbed out of below the summit.  Inside the clouds it was a bit cold and at times misty, but above and on the summit it was nice and comfortable while sheltered from the wind.  With the cloud bank so thick we decided not to ski the Chocolate and now had lots of extra time.  Jeff wanted to head down at maybe 10:30, we told him we might relax and wait for another hour on the summit.  I had left my ice ax and some extra water at the top of the Sitkum at ~9200ft and our idea (before Jeff left) was to ski the edge of the Scimitar down to the saddle where I left my stuff.  When we scoped it out however, the upper section looked pretty melted out and discontinuous.  So we skied off the summit to the S/SW (figuring on traversing back over to my stuff at the top of the Sitkum) linking some nice snowfields with only a couple short carries.  We both thought the snow was nice summer snow, with some runnels and small sun-cups but soft and easy to turn in.  We couldn't really make the travese back on snow and we ended up skiing kind of low, so we had to climb back up and over to the top of the Sitkum (maybe ~2000 vert or so).  It was more effort but we knew we'd get to ski the entire Sitkum and thus have a variation on the double-descent we were planning.  By now, the weather that we had in the moring was breaking up and it was turning into a nice summer afternoon.  The snow on the Sitkum was maybe not quite as nice as the other snow, but still quite enjoyable especially on the upper section.  We skied to the lowest snow and then hiked back down to our camp, where Jeff had been waiting much longer than he thought he would.  In the future on trips with diverging plans/routes maybe I'll bring walkie-talkies to help allieviate confusion.  Of course, there are worse places to spend a couple extra hours than Boulder Basin on a summer afternoon.  We strapped skis onto packs and busted out the 8+ miles back to the car, arriving at ~9pm for a round trip time car to car of about 25 hours.  Twenty-five hours very well spent, but as I sit here a bit sore writing this I am thinking my next trip might be to the lifts at Timberline  8).