Colchuck

James and I had a ski on Colchuck Gl today. The top half was so loud I put in my ear plugs. The bottom 800 feet skied nicely and we skied all the way to the lake. We started at 6am at the parking lot and were on track for a 10am top-out. It rained last night and then froze. I was hoping for new snow, but that was not to be. The surface was so firm that our edges did not leave an imprint. Ski crampon marks were the only evidence of passing. I had boot crampons, but James did not, so we stopped at the top of the split between the terminal moraine and the eastern snow finger and waited for the sun to soften the snow. By the time the sun poked over Dragontail, the clouds had amassed and there was no softening to expect. So we decided not to go up and skied from there.

No joke, I wore earplugs.

From the car to the ski and back to the trail at the south end of Colchuck was a normal experience, but then the number of people started to be non-standard. I keep a tally sheet. Normally it lives in my pocket and comes out when I pass people. Today it came out and stayed out. Sometimes we saw 30 people in one place. It was nuts.

Number of people passed from my tally sheet:

car to ski and back to south end of lake: 63

south end of the lake to the north end: 115

north end of the lake to the Stuart Lake trail split: 330

trail split to trailhead: 188

Total: 696! (compare to previous max of 273)

We saw 1 dog, a guy flying a drone, 7 people with speakers, a couple openly smoking a joint, one guy carrying a pistol in a tactical holster on his belly, lots of perfume, and 6 other skiers. On the way to the TH, I saw a bear run across the Icicle River Road and then squeeze under the guardrail on the river side. There are new  signs in the parking lot that limit some parking area (about half the perimeter) to people with overnight permits. There are also new signs that say no parking on the road. This didn't stop the road parking. I counted 96 cars in the full lot Saturday afternoon, and 193 along the road between Colchuck and 8-mile Trailheads. This was nuts. Some photos of the parking:

Here is something else interesting that happened today. Two panicked women stopped us on the trail and wanted us to look into a military backpack and coat that they had found in the river. They had seen this gear and pulled it to shore and were upset over what it might mean. The pack had a name-tag on it; Jenkins. This mystery is unsolved.