3-25-08 Black Butte tour

With my afternoon free, I decided to go check out Black Butte, as the lower elevation snow is starting to fade. The east and north slopes are still completely snow covered.

I left the camper around 1pm, and decided to try and find some kind of forest service road that circled around from the NW of BB to the E, this was a stupid decision, and it cost me some shwacking - I could have gone directly to BB, gained a little elevation, then traversed to the E from there, instead of trying to do it half a mile from it's base in pondo and manzanita.

I donned skins at the base of the NE slopes and traversed my way to the E slopes, which holds the only feasable true summit shot, and therefore the greatest relief. The snow was corn to slush low down, then mixed to a breakable crust, to non-breakable with blowing snow higher up.

The summit of BB is one of those special places which is beyond the descriptive power of words. I skied down the East slopes, then booted up to the second lower summit, and skied more enjoyable corn on N slopes, a little traverse to gain the NW flank, then skied corn to deep slop on one of the many NW options. Booted back up and skied it again - without stopping - and even though it was deep slop for much of the 1500v' shot, it was one of the more enjoyable shots I can remember skiing in a while - a twenty minute grin ski shot at the least.

A ~4500v' tour on 30-45dg corn/mank.

Looks like I narrowly escaped an encounter with a Morian, or UFO judging by one of these pictures, people say there are a lot of the little green fellows around here.