January '09: Mt. Shuksan - White Salmon Glacier Ski Tour

Pete Hetrick and I linked up through cascadeclimbers.com. Since losing my job, I've been always looking for new partners who have a flexible schedule. Pete has some weekday availability, and we decided to head out for a 1 - day ski tour of the White Salmon glacier on Mt. Shuksan mid-January.

As in 1-day Seattle-to-Seattle. We meet up at the Ravenna Park & Ride at 1:30am, which seemed pretty reasonable at the time. The drive up went really quickly in the middle of the night. My drowsiness was kept at bay with a little help from the late night (or early morning?) Jack in the Box.

I'm not much of a skier, and I tried my best to let Pete know this so as not to get expectations up. The approach involved a couple of hours of skinning through the trees from the Baker ski resort. It was my first real ski tour this winter, and was tedious. We ended up crossing four or five gullies. Pete had no problem with this; I, on the other hand, had to get creative. This included unclipping skis, dropping them down into the gully, then Batman-ing down tree branches since I couldn't really ski down the steep gully walls.

Eventually we broke out of trees, and I was relieved. Now all we had to do was cross several large avalanche debris fields. The temps were stable and we weren't too concerned about anything coming down. Eventually we made our way up to the snow slopes below the White Salmon. We were treated to a nice sunrise on the peaks to the north.

After some discussion, Pete and I quickly began referring to the snow conditions this day as a 'death crust'. As in a very hard but breakable crust with unconsolidated powder underneath. My resort skiing skills would be worthless here!

The White Salmon was kinda steep and kinda icy, so we opted to mount the skis on the packs and boot up. Very quickly we decided that we wouldn't be skiing down given the icy conditions. Stashing the skis, we headed up anyway for a nice ascent. We figured we had time to top out on the glacier and head down in order to make it out by dark.

Eventually we saw some ski tracks higher up on the glacier. Someone had skied this bad boy a few days earlier. To make myself feel better, I conjectured that they got in on much better snow conditions (e.g. less icy and less crusty) than we encountered. Seems like it might have been the tracks of some local celebrities, given the date of our trip.

Up high it became thigh-deep postholing, and our progress slowed significantly. We turned back a few hundred feet from the top of the glacier. Eventually it was time to put the skis on. Pete looked like he was posing for pictures for an instructional guide to telemark skiing with his good form.

I, on the other hand, couldn't keep it upright long enough for Pete to even take a good picture of me moving. So just look at this image and trust that I made my way down in one piece.

Once down, it was back through the trees to the resort. We crossed the avy debris fields without incident and got back to the car for about a 10 hour day (plus about 6 hours of driving). It was a good time. Thanks for a good day, Pete!