December 21, 2002, Tatoosh Backcountry

After a hard day skiing with Charles et al., another friend was looking for his first day of the season, so Simon and I decided to check out the Tatoosh. We left early in my saturn, thinking it wouldn't be bad weather I didn't mind going in a non-4 wheel drive car that couldn't accept chains. The rain on I-5 was a tad bit disturbing, but it wasn't until 5 miles from the park entrance, where the rain slowly started to turn to snow, that was when we realized that my car would not make it up to the falls parking lot. Traction tires were required to get to longmire and my car was skidding. While we were getting dressed we were also looking for a ride up the mountain, but nobody had any room. We actually got our skis in hand and walked to the road to hitch, but the ranger wouldn't not allow this. This sorta stuff always troubles me, because I spend 95% of my time in the north cascades and am not used to all these rules of the other national parks. We went back to the lot and within no time we scored a ride, that dropped us off at the turn off for reflection lake. As we started to skin, we noticed two people struggling up the side and pulling themselves onto the road. We spent the entire day with them and they turned out to be TAY folk: Brent and Nick. It was snowing all morning and into early afternoon, maybe a half foot of fresh. We followed a snowshoe path for a while and made it up to the saddle east of pinnacle peak. The upper basin was scoured and there were rocks showing. Besides that area, it was pleasant snow, the fresh powder over the stable two feet of snow from earlier this week. We went down staying skiers right of the main section of the bowl that contained the exposed rocks and we eventually found a nice gully to ski. The gully wasn't as stable as we would have liked and it had a couple yellow lights. Simon and I went down after Brent and Nick. I went and set off sluffs with every turn. As Simon started a few slab pieces went down, only a half-foot or less, but this was a terrain trap. More skiing was found below this and was so good we had to take another run. So we skinned all the way back up to the saddle and what Simon and I thought to be a better run then the first, but I was starting to feel the back to back days. We were all able to ski out the road and back to the parking lot. Brent and Nick gave us a ride down to longmire and we were back in Seattle at 8pm.