December 6, 2003, Red Mountain, Snoqualmie

Left Alpental Road and skinned to Commonwealth Basin. Crossing Commonwealth Creek involved walking through the creek, as there is nowhere where the snow is built up enough yet. Trail breaking through Commonwealth Basin was not so bad but became very arduous as I gained the toe of the SW ridge of Red Mtn. Took a long ass time to finally make it to the lake below the W. face of Red. The snow had about 3" of wind compacted snow on top of ~20" of loose unconsolidated snow. This made skinning very tiring as the dense snow on top was not quite thick enough to prevent skis from sinking and once they got under that dense snow, that's where they wanted to stay. Needless to say, the going got very slow and tiring. Skinned up to 5400' and called it good. Dug a pit. Total depth: 80". With that dense surface layer and the 20" of new unconsolidated snow on top of the old rain layer which is about 4" thick. Below that there is some very dense well consolidated snow ~15" or so thick. Then another frozen rain layer, that sitting on top of many many inches of semi consolidated rounds. Anyway the snowpack was pretty stable considering all of the wind recently and considering I was on the lee slope from that wind storm. Anyway, skied down from that point as trying to go up anymore was becoming an extreme chore, and time was getting scarce. The skiing was really good. Skied down to where the lake is, then turned skiers left and dropped over the S. Side of the SW ridge and skied open gullies all the way down into the basin. Getting back out was another story all in itself. Many sketchy stream crossings and skiing back down the deep trench lower portions of the trail have become after all the snowshoer traffic. It's kind of like a toboggan run. Pretty fun as long as you stay in the trench, because when you miss a turn things get ugly. Made it back to the car pretty beat, and hoofed it to the Timberwolf for a cold brew.
~Ross