Saturday, December 19, 2015

Day 6 of the season- Snoqualmie Pass


pictures here


Last Saturday, Becky and I climbed up the Alpental ski area for a couple laps...the last day before the resort started to prep for opening in the coming days.   The top half was excellent, but the lower half was pretty marginal...still lots of creeks, rocks, alder, etc. The following day we toured around Stevens Pass...much better coverage but still rather short runs off of Skyline Ridge before we hit early season obstacles (creeks, brush, etc).
The past week, one storm after the next hammered the Cascades, and our dear friend Snoqualmie Pass picked up a ton of snow.  With the resorts up there now open, it was time to tour a little further afield and get back to some slopes that were never even skiable last year.
A trip report was posted on the Turns-All-Year website the day before for the Kendall trees area, so we figured that might be a rather busy spot, so we opted for some spots around Source Lake.  The snow was deep, and pretty light too...after last season it was wonderful to ski around Snoqualmie in deep, floaty snow. 
At the end of the day as we skied back towards Source Lake, we were surprised to see barely any tracks on the slopes that normally would be thrashed at days end... we guessed that a lot of folks didn't think the Snoqualmie backcountry was deep enough to ski yet.   The shuffle back out to the parking lot took a bit longer than usual as the downtrack wasn't really set in yet and there were lots of small ups and downs that required sidestepping and shuffling.
What a day though... we all know that El Nino years can mean a bad winter later in the season, but man..at least we've off to a good start at the beginning of the winter!