July 4th, Mt. Adams Southwest Chutes

I was unusually luke-warm about this trip in the two weeks leading up to it. The plan was, like last year, to drive down to Mt. Adams on Friday, climb and ski the Southwest Chutes on Saturday, then drive to Hood and ski that on Sunday. With job dissatisfaction weighing my mood down, that just sounded like a hell of a lot of work to me.

Anastasia had the opposite reaction -- difficult times at work made her more eager to go. A need, even, to be in the mountains and get away for a while. As is often the case, her enthusiasm pulled me along until my own could take over.

The Cold Springs trailhead was quieter than we expected when we rolled in on Friday evening. We got a nice set of campsites only about 100 yards from the bathrooms and had plenty of time to relax and chat before hitting the sack for several hours of intermittent sleep in the back of the van.

We headed up the trail at 5:15, packing boots and skis in favor of light hikers. The first significant snow starts near the RTM trail, but it's patchy until you get above the Crescent Glacier bowl, so we kept the skis and boots on our back all the way to Piker's Peak. The entire south climb is pretty heavily suncupped -- I was feeling sorry for the folks who'd planned to ski it, because it really didn't look like that much fun.

After a brief, windy rest at Piker's, we pushed on to the top and arrived to a "St. Helens Mother's Day" atmosphere at just after noon. It was calm and comfortable, but we knew the sun was starting to pound the chutes and we wanted to get them at corn o-clock, so we started down in fairly short order.

The summit "blob" above Piker's shared the same nasty suncups as the south climb, so we scooted out to skier's left in hopes of finding a smoother line -- not to happen. A skier-scoured slalom course made for reasonable (if prescribed) turns to get down to the bottom and we were soon dropping into the Chutes to find fairly smooth snow and excellent corn, with only a hint of ice and suncups in spots.

Bliss, to the bottom, where it gets choked off and exits onto the lower angled, heavily suncupped apron below, studded with bombardments from the crumbling Suksdorf ridge. Pete had a near miss exiting the Chutes, as a refrigerator size pinwheeling boulder had been set loose by the sun. It turns out that a party about 30 minutes behind us had a member take a rock in the ribs and arm -- not a big one, thankfully, but enough to slow their descent and get them to the trailhead close to midnight.

We skied straight down, with two short carries, to about 6600 feet, where we racked the skis and boots for the quick hike to the RTM and the long, dusty circle back to Cold Springs. I found out later in the week that we could have skied an additional 200 feet, had we stayed a little left -- ah well. An excellent day, with great company and beautiful weather. We were all satisfied with our day on Adams and decided to have a leisurely breakfast and drive back to Seattle a bit early. Hood next time. Video to follow.

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