March 29, 2008, Sasser Ridge

Because of the heavy snow fall Friday, we decided to head east of the crest, assuming not quite as much snow had been dumped there, making a trip less stressful and more enjoyable. We left around 7:30 from Renton and headed for Roslyn. From Roslyn we followed the Salmon la Sac road, past the lake, as far as we could till we hit a small parking lot near Nfd 4315 Rd. At around 9 to 9:30 we started skinning towards Sasser Ridge with another party which arrived around the same time at the parking lot as we did. We had about 7/8 cloud coverage, but the sun managed to break through a couple times. It was out enough to give us a nice suntan, no burns  ;D. We followed the ridgeline up to the top of Sasser Ridge and all the way around until we could get a good view of Jolly Mountain at around 5500ft. By this point, it was already 13:30 and we decided to turn around and use the rest of the day to get in some turns. We ate lunch and then traversed back to the west side of Sasser Ridge. On the way up, we skinned through about 15in of fresh powder snow. By the time, we were ready for our descent the new snow had quite a bit of time to settle in, potentially forming a hazardous snow layer on top of the recent ice crust. We set up a Rutschblock, which failed rather quickly. The new snow had already started to slab up and had not yet bonded to the ice crust below. Based on the data we decided to take it easy and ski down the path we came up along the ridgeline. We all got safely back to the parking lot about a quarter past five concluding an awesome day with some really nice turns at the end  :D