20 November 2010 - 1st Storm?

Friday I got a pretty good look at the Cascades flying over to Eastern Washington and back for a flight test. It looks like there's plenty of snow at the higher elevations, and on the north slopes it goes all the way down to the foothills. Today was spent digging winter clothes out of the garage, waxing the skis and buying a sno-park pass on-line. First ski trip tomorrow morning! (Don't worry, we'll bring snowshoes in case the conditions don't live up to the fantasy.)

8 November 2010 - Rock Mountain Snowshoe Trip

Cool weather and precipitation late in the week means snow in the mountains for the weekend!

The forecast for Sunday was questionable, but we figured if we went high enough we’d be in snow instead of rain, so Octo and I grabbed our snow shoes and rain gear and headed for Rock Mountain up on Nason Ridge. Snow we found - not enough to ski on just yet - but enough to put the snowshoes to good use. The trail was white by 5000’ and at 6000’ we were in deep enough to strap on our lighting ascents and we used them from there all the way to the summit.

Sure we had rain and fog and driving snow, but only enough to ease us into winter recreation mode. The precip tapered off in the afternoon and the wind blew in from Eastern Washington as we were hiking out, so we were dried out by the time we got back to the car. Sure glad we didn't talk ourselves out of a good trip just because of lousy forecast.

A few pics just to document the occasion here…

16 October 2010 - Navaho Peak

View from Navaho Peak: Ingalls, Daniel (w/snow), Stuart+Sherpa, Agonaut, Colchuck, Dragontail, Little Annapurna, McClellan
The weather forecast was good and saturday was free, so Octavian and I headed over to the east side of the mountains. We wanted to get up somewhere high and take in the fall colors, so we chose Navaho Peak up on the Teanaway range. Probably should have checked the calendar a little more closely because this is also known as GMU 335, one of the more "productive" game management units in Washington, and this was opening day for the modern firearms season and neither of us had anything orange to wear. Our first hint was all the pickup trucks headed over the pass and the dozens of deer hiding out with the cows in the fields on the outskirts of Cle Elum. We drove past a huge tent city at 29 Pines and dozens of other individual hunting camps along the road to the trail head, but we didn't see any more big game after we went past the last farm house. We were a little nervous on the first mile or so of the trail, but it didn't take us too long to leave behind the hunters on foot and we figured the ones on horseback would still be sober enough to tell we didn't have antlers. We only heard one gunshot all day so I think we were pretty safe, and I think we can assume the deer were all OK down in Cle Elum as well. Hopefully they stayed there all weekend.

The trail is classic eastern Washington - blue skies, tall pines and brilliant yellow and orange larch trees scattered around the open hilltops, and lots of horse sign on the trail.

We were probably a week or two past the best fall colors, but there was still plenty of awesome scenery. There was frost on the trail when we started and it stayed frozen all day at the higher elevations which naturally got us thinking about the ski season. The sno-park situation here is pretty biased toward motorized users, but we would sure like to get back up the Stafford Creek valley on our skis. (Any snowmobilers out there willing to tow a couple of skiers up FR 9703 this winter?)

Check out the pictures here on Picasa. I think some of them turned out OK, and if you'd like a higher resolution copy of any of them, drop me a note.

10 October 2010 - Rainy weekend working on pictures

Too wet for climbing or hiking this weekend and still to warm to ski so I'll catch up on some photo organizing I've been meaning to do. First up, I've finally scanned and posted a collection of photographs of my dad.

Here's his 1940 graduating class from North Powder High School:

It's hard to say what those women were thinking.

And here he is on the same steps a couple of years ago:


I just put a few pictures, mainly of interest to family and friends here on picasa. Let me know if you have something I should add.

6 March 2010 - Marymoor

Wow, a fine spring Saturday coming up but we've got an evening date planned so it's a short day to be outside. What to do? Call a few friends to meet us at the park and jump on the bikes and ride down to the climbing wall! Good thing we got there early (by in-city climbing standards), by 2:00pm every anchor had someone on it (some of them pretty young and speaking Japanese - looks like Takeo was introducing his kid's friends to climbing?) Fortunately we had plenty of time before that to wear out our arms on the faux cliffs. Made leaning over the handlebars for the ride back a little tough, but that took my mind off the other parts of my body that haven't been abused by a bicycle all winter.

The evening at Literary Lions went well too. Call us socialists out here in western Washington, but you've got to admit we've got some great parks and libraries.

Thanks for the picture Don.

28 February 2010 - Reflection Lakes Mt Rainier

Spring skiing in February!

All week it's been warm days with off and on rain in the mountains. The grooming reports from the sno-parks have been grim. The parks at Snoqualmie pass were reported to be icy and the groomer admitted on his website that his machine was just making things worse, so all the lower elevation sites were ruled out. This is also the weekend for Hog Loppet, which was fun last year but we weren't signed up this year so Blewett Pass was out too.

The weather report was good though, so we grabbed the skis and headed down to Mt. Rainier. If we couldn't have groomed trails, we at least wanted something easy, so we skied from Paradise to Reflection Lakes. This is a different kind of tour because you start at the top (5400') and ski down to the lake (4800'). Trip is mostly on the road, but the slope can look a little intimidating, because the steepest grade is at the top just as you leave the parking lot, and you can see all the way down the valley as soon as you make the first little turn. But even though it looks like you could build up some speed on the way down, it really is pretty gentle. Good thing too, because you have to come all the back up on the return trip!

When we got down to the bottom of Paradise Valley, we took the marked route over Mazama Ridge to avoid an avalanche slope above the road. This is a little shorter than staying on the road, but the trail through the woods was a bit much for fish scales and skinny skis so we carried the skis on our packs in a few spots. There had been so many snowshoers over the pass packing down the trial that it was no problem walking in ski boots.

By the time we stopped for lunch at Reflection Lakes, the morning clouds were gone. Mt. Rainier hides in the clouds a lot during the winter, but man when it comes out on a day like this, it almost hurts to look at it.

Too soon we had to turn around and hike back over Mazama Ridge and make the long climb back to Paradise, but the snow just got better as the day went on, and it really didn't feel like much work at all on such a beautiful day as this.

The snow wasn't perfect, but the weather was, and I think we'll remember this little tour as good one when the lower elevations aren't available to us.
Check out the rest of the pictures[here on Picasa].

By the way, I haven't given up on the overdue posts listed in the previous entry - check back later and look for updates in the list below.

The problem with Blogging

UPDATED for 6 January.
So the problems with this blog - beside El Niño with its death crust and endless rain preventing any progress on my sno-park quest - are (1) I occasionally post entries out of order and when I add entries but don’t change the top post nobody notices there’s new material; and (2) it takes me forever to process the pictures the way I like them and to write up these little trip reports. That wouldn’t be a problem except I have a day job that already has me staring at a computer for 40 hours a week, and I would much rather be out hiking or skiing or even hanging out at the climbing gym than sitting here working on photoshop and Blogspot. All this means I’m way behind on my updates.

I know there aren’t too many CCF readers out there, but I have had a couple people ask why I haven’t posted anything lately. So until I clear some of the backlog, or just get tired of looking at this, here’s the list of the posts and pictures I’m working on. Watch them turn into links as I catch up:

• 5 February: Blewett Pass Ski
• 31 January: Paradise Ski
• 25 January: Amabalis ski
• 9 January: Cabin Creek ski
• 6 January:Yodelin Snowshoe (done)
• 31 December: Fields Spring ski
• 23 December: Mt. Emily ski
• 6 December: Guye/Snoqualmie saddle snowshoe (& crampons!)
• 23 November: Cabin Creek ski
• 14 November: Amabilis ski
• 11 October: Lake Janus hike (done)
• 10 October: Silver Peak hike (done)

Oh yes, I also want to convert my sno-park tick list from Excel to HTML and post it up here as well. By my count I'm at 15 of 47.

6 January 2010 - Making Snowshoeing Look Like Fun

The company extended our Christmas break this year and gave everybody the first week of January off. No pay of course, but they said the alternative was layoffs so most of us weren't complaining. I wouldn't complain about an extra week off in the middle of winter anyway, at least if it was a normal year. But this winter hasn't been normal - it seems like every snow storm we've had since November has been immediately followed by freezing rain. This week wasn't much different, maybe even worse than the last storm, so I guess I am complaining just a little bit.

I saw the extra week as lost cause for skiing, but Mr. Obright saw it as a great chance to drag a bunch of our fellow furloughed or otherwise non-occupied friends from work outside and introduce them to the joys of snowshoeing. Since I wasn't going to get much skiing in this week, I elected to tag along on the Yodelin trip.

Yodelin is often a great place to ski, snowboard or snowshoe outside of the commercial ski areas. Even though one of the main reasons it's no longer an active ski area was a devastating avalanche 40 years ago, there are some fairly protected lines up and down the main ridge so it's one the places we visit at least a couple of times every winter. There was no avalanche danger this week though - the entire snowpack was encased in a solid sheet of ice. Snowshoes were the only reasonable way to get around. While we were getting ready in the parking lot though, I saw one couple head out on alpine touring gear.

As we headed up under a bright sun and blue skies, the ice on every twig and branch glistened like cut glass. We went up through the trees, climber's left of the main building at the head of the parking lot. It seems like every year the trees get a little thicker, but it only took a couple of minutes to get on the main road headed up the hill. Even though the trees are filling in in places, there's still plenty of open space once you get up past the bench at about 4200'. Web reports say the ski area closed in 1974, so I actually would have expected more of it to have returned to forest by now. As we hiked up, we were speculating that maybe someone periodically drives the cat tracks and knocks down the new growth, at least on the old road beds. I've never hiked up here in the summer, but after we got back I looked at the satellite photos and it does look like at least some of the cat tracks must be cleared periodically.

In any case, we had a pleasant walk up and down in the sunshine, with our snowshoes crunching through the crust the entire time. We got back to the parking lot at the same time the skiers limped back their car. Turns out the guy had some new skis he just couldn't wait to try out - but all he could today is laugh at how bad the skiing was.

Poor skiing, but the not bad for taking pictures of the snow; here's a handful of snapshots
on this web album.