Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Norse Peak, Sunday January 4


Welcome to my first post! At this blog I'll chronicle the skiing, mountain biking and climbing adventures I've done or heard about first hand. This will be primarily in the Cascade mountains near Seattle.


Wow! 8 inches of fresh snow over a recent rain crust made for some excellent backcountry skiing. Norse Peak is directly east of the Crystal Mountain ski area. We skinned to the top (happily someone had already broken trail), did a few runs down the back, which I believe is Cement Basin, then a few down the front. Only minimial instabilities in the snow were noted, but in fact my partner Tim was caught in a small avalanche as we stupidly skiied a leeward (NE facing) slope. He stayed above the snow so thankfully there was no penalty. The east facing aspect of Cement Basin had 8-10 inches of unconsolidated powder and was fantastic skiing. The photo here is looking at Crystal Mountain and Mt. Rainier from the top of Norse Peak. Of course no backcountry adventure would be complete without some screw up; ours happened to be not cutting left soon enough on the exit and having to walk half a mile up the road to get back to our car at the end of the day.

No comments:

Post a Comment