I reached the trailhead from Big Pine in early afternoon, stowed my extra food in one of the bear boxes, and made the hike on the trail from the backpacker lot. This trail is more scenic than hiking the road, but I can’t think that it is necessarily any faster, as you have to gain maybe a couple hundred feet as the path winds across the hillside, only to drop it all to reach the creek, where the trail splits. On my way out, I took the road. Read more…
After a successful ski of Rainier the day prior, Dylan, Nolan and I packed up and motored down to Trout Lake, a small town between Hood River to the south and the Mt. Adams Wilderness area to the north. With near-perfect weather continuing to hold throughout the weekend and two more climbing days before our flight home, we knew we had a great shot of skiing Mt. Adams and potentially even Mt. Hood. Read more…
In June of 2012 a few of us headed up to Washington and attempted a climb and ski of Mt. Rainer via the Fuhrer Finger. After spending the night camped halfway up the mountain we tried for the summit the next morning and soon found ourselves in a total whiteout. Not fancying the idea of being in glaciated terrain with zero visibility we turned around some 2,500 feet shy of the top and got out of there. Then with most of the Pacific Northwest socked in for the following 8+ days, we gave up on Rainier and headed south for greener pastures. Ever since I had always wanted to return and finish the job, and it finally came to fruition 2 weeks ago along with an awesome crew in Dylan Friday and Nolan Amos. Read more…
It’s no secret that this winter has been a great one in Colorado and is currently showing no signs of slowing down as we are now into April and it just keeps on snowing. The statewide snowpack sits at 139% of average as of April 3rd with the graph trending almost identically to the historic season of 2019. It’s the type of year that has one wondering just how long we’ll be skiing for given the snow totals to date. Read more…