Finally Skiing - A Two Tour Weekend

It has been a fairly dismal snow year here in the Pacific Northwest. Our passes to the Snoqualmie resorts lie crisp and fresh, untouched, in our helmets. Amid the organized chaos of involvement with 3 or 4 Search And Rescue teams between the two of us, we've had precious little time to use those passes, even if there had been snow to play on, so when we looked at the schedule and realized that the last weekend in January was blissfully free of commitments, we decided to ski tour both days and make the most of it.

Saturday: The ski tours we've done so far this year have been largely about exposing new folks to the sport, so it was no surprise that Saturday was shaping up to be similar. Jessica (who works with AP) and Suzanne (who's on the K9 team with us) joined us (and the pooch) for a trip to Diamond Head at Blewett Pass. After enduring three days of difficult touring conditions with us, we'd finally begun exposing Jessica to better snow and longer tours, so we hoped to continue the trend. Suzanne has more experience in the backcountry, but is still fairly new to touring and skiing deep snow, so we tried to plan a mellow route, with minimal steep terrain.

Being an experienced wilderness traveler (she's the senior dog handler on the K9 unit), Suzanne had researched our destination well. The only place she didn't want to go was the NE side of Diamond Head, as it was the steeper aspect and she knew she wouldn't be comfortable. Naturally, we did our best to end up smack in the middle of the NE slopes, with no way to go but down.

Okay, not quite, but since we'd never been to this area before we did end up on the NE slopes and Suzanne did end up skiing them -- to her delight. Though she was nervous, she committed to her first turns and had a great time and a bit of a backcountry breakthrough. Jessica and AP hooted and hollered (J on her new skis -- she's been borrowing AP's) and we were all ecstatic to find a good foot of beautiful "hero" powder, in which we could all do no wrong.

After a quick lap, we worked our way out through the trees to the packed out trail below. We took a short break to de-snowball Hopi, who looked like she was being attacked from below by some parasitic ice-monster, and then flew off down the trail to the car. Hopi was in full-sprint mode, screaming along right behind us, and had bounced off all the remaining snowballs by the time we got down. A fantastic day.

Sunday: I'll admit my motivation was a little low on Saturday night, with the prospect of an early morning start for a trip to Jim Hill, at Stevens Pass. As usual, Anastasia's enthusiasm kept me rolling, so we re-packed and dried our things and tucked into bed early. Up at 5:15 Sunday, I took Tundra (we were pup-sitting this weekend) and Hopi for a walk, then we locked them in the Room Of Despair (where puppies go to wait for people to come home) and met Murray, Pete and Becky at the Park & Ride at 6:15.

A good crew is always important for touring -- it makes the miles and the climbing go by more quickly and adds a buffer between tired legs and the brain. All five of us had skied the day prior and the ski season hasn't been kind to our leg-strength, so that buffer was key on the approach. We quickly reached Lake Lanham and found an excellent skin track already in place, climbing up to the ridge. With no need to break trail we saved an hour on the approach and found ourselves at the top, in the fog, just after noon, hoping to get a glimpse of the north bowl of Jim Hill.

Incredibly flat light and thick valley fog eventually forced us to turn back toward Lake Lanham and leave the bowl for another day. Our reward was a few hundred feet of fantastic snow, followed by steep, tight trees and knee-tweaking wet concrete. We all managed to get down unharmed and, after a snack break at the lake, we tucked into the icy snowshoe track and skied out to the car without incident. Groupthink during the ride home led us all to (separately) order pizza for dinner, which Murray enjoyed while watching 60 Minutes. A fantastic weekend, all around.