Becky and I had a few days off over the New Years weekend - unfortunately the weather immediately preceding our days off wasn't very kind to the snowpack.
We joined some friends for a short ski tour on Saturday at Snoqualmie Pass - it was snowing...barely... another few hundred feet lower and we would've been in rain. The snow was a deep, funky mixture of rain saturated stuff lower down, topped with a breakable refreezing crust from the rain event the night before with a few inches of new snow on top. The skiing was ugly, and we threw in the towel after just about 1,000ft of climbing... time to head home, dry out the gear, and hit the reset button for the rest of the weekend.
Sunday and Monday had sunny weather in the forecast but we figured anything low elevation would have the same breakable crust we encountered...so we opted to take our chances going high - it was off to Rainier to goof around.
With the winter gate to Paradise opening at 9am and closing at 5pm, doing a day trip to Rainier is rarely at the top of our to-do list...it always feels a little rushed....so we brought the camping gear, and stayed for two days.
Sunny days are usually shared with a ton of other skiers when sticking to the usual Paradise to Camp Muir route...but we're rather fond of scooting further around to the east to setting up camp near Cowlitz Rocks where we can find a variety of slopes and generally have the place to ourselves.
We only ran into three other day-tripping skiers out there Sunday and enjoyed a lovely sunset and moonrise. As usual, the long nights this time of year meant we hit the sack at about 6:30pm and slept for 14 hours...yup.... 14 hours.
Sunday was sunny, warmer, and had some legitimately good skiing from 9,500ft back down to our camp at 6,800ft. After a nice long run on the Paradise glacier, we packed up our gear and slid for the parking lot.
link to photo album
