Saturday, April 15, 2006, Alpental

With promises of new snow, plans were in place to enjoy some last lift-served before focusing my attention on my spring backcountry objectives. Reading the weather report on Friday then seeing the new snow amount reading only 2" turned my hopes of fresh pow into a, "Well, it's still skiing, let's go anyway," attitude. While certainly less than ideal, I'm glad we headed up.

We arrived to a crowded mountain due to a race being run on Debbie's Gold from mid-mountain to base, but that was fine since the bottom half of the hill had a mean look where it hadn't been groomed with melt grooves, ice patches, frozen solid debris, and even some shrubbery. The upper mountain looked a little less mean since it was bathed in fresh, brilliant white, but we feared that the new snow might just be hiding the death cookies that gave the new blanket of snow an uneven, sinister appearance. No better way to find out then launch off into it though and that we did.

To our surprise the cookies crumbled beneath our edges and the snow, though a bit wind-affected, skied like it looked--fresh! For several runs we stayed up top, finding fresh tracks down Rollen into Gunmount, down Schluct into "secret chute", out into powder bowl, off the side of Kante in a couple places, over the Fan, and down into the trees from Breakover. Upper I held good turns on the far right and Adrenaline made for some great fun.

Finally the backcountry opened for the afternoon where we enjoyed fresh tracks down Stokes into the unpleasantness of Sucker Chute and the avy-debris choked bowls below and to its sides.

While it certainly wasn't a powder day to compare with others this year, (powder in mid-April at Snoqualmie Pass is a rarity, indeed) I'm glad I was able to get some. While it may be sacreligious to say so, I'm ready to harvest some spring corn so let's get on with the melt/freeze cycle.