December 23, 2009, Bachelor Backside

Swung through the Dutchman Flat parking lot with aspirations of skiing Tumalo Bowl, but didn't find anyone who looked like they wanted a touring partner. Decided lift served was the way to go.

Today was the first day Northwest was open, giving access to arguably the best area of the mountain with perfectly fresh snow. Due to the 'no uphill traffic' rule, I, uhh, traversed ACROSS to the summit, where there were perfect views of the three sisters wilderness up to Mt Adams, and south to Shasta, as well as the avi control work in the cirque. I descended fields of rime ice and windblown til I hit treeline. 8000 feet was where the goods were at, and it got better the closer you got to the NE. As much as I hate to admit it, the absolute best snow was on the NE side of the cinder cone down to the West Village parking lot.

Took a few pictures, but due to the absolute lack of user friendliness on the iMac I'm using, I could only get 1 to compress to the req'd size (seriously, you can argue the merits of a Mac as much as you want, but if i can't sit down and in 5 minutes compress a picture to 200kb, what is the computing world coming to???). *edit: I can't get any of my pics below 200kb, so unless someone can help me out, this is another one of those useless TR's w/o pics...sorry.

**edit: I did it! 1 pic, sorry for the anti-apple rant.

Minus the run-in with the iMac, it was an awesome day.

p.s. there were some nice lines at the base of broken top. I've got a week off from work if anybody has an extra snow machine...

If using iPhoto go to File>Export, use JPEG as Kind, smallest as Quality and Size as med or small.

The GF and I are thinking about heading down to Bend for the month of March or April for some skiing/climbing/trail running - I love that place.

Must've been one helluva traverse.

Went back to bachelor on the 24th. They opened summit lift which accessed 360 degrees of the top 1500'. It got tracked up quick, but was really worth it.

If using iPhoto go to File>Export, use JPEG as Kind, smallest as Quality and Size as med or small.

The GF and I are thinking about heading down to Bend for the month of March or April for some skiing/climbing/trail running - I love that place. 

Thanks for the help! Yeah, it's always nice coming back to Bend. Can't forget about the mountain biking and the 5 local breweries (the Bond St Deschutes brew pub has an outrageous number of awesome beers that they don't distribute)!