claurel
New member
I've still got Christmas shopping to do, but I decided to skip that and head up to Crystal for a day of snowboarding with my friend Adrianne. System after system has been moving through the Northwest this week; individually, none of them has dumped huge amounts of snow, but together they've filled in the mountain nicely. Another eight inches fell overnight to low snow levels, erasing any doubts about whether mountains or mall was the right choice.
There were avalanche charges going off everywhere when we arrived. The patrol was clearly working hard to open the North and South Backcountry. Surprisingly, the mountain was not crowded at all, with only a weekday sized crowd. The folks had Crystal had obviously anticipated a lot more traffic, but the mazes that they'd set up to control lift lines were empty.
We made Exterminator our first run--it's a long double diamond with a consistently steep pitch from top to bottom. We weren't the first people on it, but we had fresh turns for a good part of the run. In the sections with a few tracks, we occasionally found some crust below the 8" of new in places. Overall though, an excellent start to the day. We followed with a couple runs off Chair 6--one into Powder Bowl, the other on the Campbell Basin side. Snow had sluffed of parts of the Powder Bowl, exposing some of that unpleasant crust we'd found earlier. We just traversed past that and found great conditions on the sections of the slope still covered by the new snow.
The highlights of the day were the two runs we made in the North Backcountry. A short ridgeline hike/traverse is all that's required to get back to this area, where we found large areas of untouched snow--over 1000' vertical of fresh tracks through open and lightly wooded areas. I still prefer the big bowls in the South Backcountry, but the North was exceptional today--2500' of powder (well, maybe that last 200' feet was a bit ugly.) The only drawback is that you've got to wait at the bottom for the shuttle to take you back to the lifts. I think it only runs once every 20-30 minutes, and that's more time than my legs need to recover.
The South Backcountry opened late in the afternoon. We'd hoped to end our day with a line off the top of Silver King, but arrived about two minutes too late. We made a couple laps on some cruisers instead, which was no substitute for fresh tracks in Southback. Other than that frustration, it was an excellent day in the Cascades. Any Washingtonians that aren't otherwise committed tomorrow should go grab some of Southback freshies tomorrow.
--Chris
There were avalanche charges going off everywhere when we arrived. The patrol was clearly working hard to open the North and South Backcountry. Surprisingly, the mountain was not crowded at all, with only a weekday sized crowd. The folks had Crystal had obviously anticipated a lot more traffic, but the mazes that they'd set up to control lift lines were empty.
We made Exterminator our first run--it's a long double diamond with a consistently steep pitch from top to bottom. We weren't the first people on it, but we had fresh turns for a good part of the run. In the sections with a few tracks, we occasionally found some crust below the 8" of new in places. Overall though, an excellent start to the day. We followed with a couple runs off Chair 6--one into Powder Bowl, the other on the Campbell Basin side. Snow had sluffed of parts of the Powder Bowl, exposing some of that unpleasant crust we'd found earlier. We just traversed past that and found great conditions on the sections of the slope still covered by the new snow.
The highlights of the day were the two runs we made in the North Backcountry. A short ridgeline hike/traverse is all that's required to get back to this area, where we found large areas of untouched snow--over 1000' vertical of fresh tracks through open and lightly wooded areas. I still prefer the big bowls in the South Backcountry, but the North was exceptional today--2500' of powder (well, maybe that last 200' feet was a bit ugly.) The only drawback is that you've got to wait at the bottom for the shuttle to take you back to the lifts. I think it only runs once every 20-30 minutes, and that's more time than my legs need to recover.
The South Backcountry opened late in the afternoon. We'd hoped to end our day with a line off the top of Silver King, but arrived about two minutes too late. We made a couple laps on some cruisers instead, which was no substitute for fresh tracks in Southback. Other than that frustration, it was an excellent day in the Cascades. Any Washingtonians that aren't otherwise committed tomorrow should go grab some of Southback freshies tomorrow.
--Chris