Home > Trip Reports > October 13, 2003, Paradise

October 13, 2003, Paradise

10/13/03
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
4372
7
Posted by snoslut on 10/13/03 4:01am
Its been 3 weeks too long and i wanted to get some turns in so me and a few buddies went up to Pan Pt.  Boy what a storm can do to the scenery.  Anyways the blues skys were out on the south side and everything was looking white.  The snow up to Pan Pt. was not bad.  Lots of wind blown around.  Made for some good pockets of freshies.  Once at the top of Pan the wind picked up alot.  Most of the snow wuz blown off...leaving ice and rock fields everywhere.  We decided not to continue due to the fact the it was not worth the effort, we were already going to enjoy around 1800 vt., and there will be more snow next weekend. (by the way we did see some other possible tayers ahead of us...curious to see how snow wuz up higher?)  On the way down my buddy Rick decided to decend the way he came up. (he skinned/booted up the west face of Pan Pt.)  Looked super steep with little room for error.  I decided to board next to the boot pack down the traverse off Pan Pt. and dropped into the little valley off Alta Vista.  Lots off wind blown pockets there and chocolate chip cookies everywhere.  Was like a mine field at times but the snow wuz fast and fresh. Our whole party enjoyed the ride/ski all the way down to our cars.  Yes down to our cars!  You can barely see the trail signs.  Just to top of some.  Pray for more white stuff.
Regine and I climbed up to about 8,800 feet, just below Moon Rocks.  Really nice wind-packed powder skiing to just above McClure Rock-Pan Point; looked too rocky to head to Edith Basin, so we hiked down from High Skyline to just past the cliff-face summer trail and skied to the parking lot in dandy fashion.  Some of the best early October skiing we've had :) :) :) :)abc

The higher you went the better it got. We went up to Camp Muir. About 200 feet below camp the wind had cleaned a strip of about 40 ft of its fresh harvest the rest was beautifully wind packed powder with lots of unpacked pockets down to moon rocks and I have to say this part again because it just makes me grin. All the way down to the parking lot.

Why did I go to work today ???

Good show, gang.
It's great to hear there's some coverage up there.
Hopefully we'll get some more this week.
Sag - we'll be seeing you at happy hour on Thursday!!

Fearing blue skies and calm winds in the forecast for Monday, a couple of the boys and I went up to Paradise Sunday to beat the nice weather.  

It was raging: low clouds spitting wet snow in strong winds; whiteout.  What better time to beat the crowd for first tracks? This, at least, is what I kept telling the boys.  They bought into it until ~7100', after which further coaxing became difficult as communication was relegated to hand signals.  

We pushed on in the gale to where they used to keep McClure Rock (did they move it? we didn't see it anywhere...) where we donned skis and followed the GPS back to Pan Point in lovely packed powder.  From there, we linked nice turns alongside the trail back to the parking lot; there was good coverage the whole way.

We were collectively puzzled at how few people were on the mountain with such lovely weather.  If you ask me, 2000' of first tracks on beautiful snow was well worth the tissue damage in Chris' hands.  And we didn't even need sunscreen.

Let me better illustrate Skip's comments about the "lovely" weather on Sunday with this photo (snoslut, I'd be happy to remove this photo if you have another to post):


A few more of the same can be found here, as well as a short movie (3MB) of what we experienced:

Heck, looks like you guys didn't even get rained on!  8) Nice viddy, BTW. I gotta get some rock skis.

Reply to this TR

1236
october-13-2003-paradise
snoslut
2003-10-13 11:01:36