Home > Trip Reports > February 9, 2003, Tatoosh

February 9, 2003, Tatoosh

2/9/03
WA Cascades West Slopes South (Mt Rainier)
5267
9
Posted by ron j on 2/10/03 11:52pm
Drove straight through the Longmire gate at 8:30 AM without even slowing down.  There was 3 or 4 carloads of bc line poachers, both @ Paradise and Narada, all seemingly trying to figure out the best secret location of yet undamaged goods.  We decided to work the avy chutes on the west and nw slopes of Pinnacle.  A bit slabby on the surface from wind action at the upper elevations, sweet snow lower where more wind protected.
 
Snow pack is pretty much bombproof (pencil hard) for the 2 to 3 ft between the most recent rain crust and the 6 inches of depth hoar near the ground.  Recent snow above the rain crust (very soft) varies between 6 inches to a foot or more depending on results of prior week's wind transport.
Lots of surface hoar; fun to ski on but scary, assuming we get more snow.  Might should order up a bit more rain just before the next dump (we will get more dumps this year... won't we?? ???).
Another couple of shots at:
http://groups.msn.com/WildHeartsSkiing/tatoosh2903.msnw
hey ron,

hope we're not the poachers you're referring to.  i didn't know where we were going til we got there.  we ended up getting away from it all over on Unicorn.  The lower chute was getting some wind deposited snow near the top, but it seemed to be well adhered to the old snow layer.  the upper snow field to the saddle was pretty good skiing, extremely variable, but never too bad.  

good day for those fatties,  hope you enjoyed yours.

allen

You're right, Allen, it was a good day for fatties.  I think all of us were the poachers I was talking about  ;)
Sounds like you ran into similar conditions to ours.  I was wondering what Foss was like.  Did you do any runs there as you passed by?
Did you happen to take the bowl nw of Foss back down to the road?

I think Foss was our original plan, if there was one, and it had tracks all over it.  we came back too late to do anything extra.  we skiied right back down the main gully from Unicorn.  we managed to get away from the crowds, but the skiing looked better on the south side of Pinnacle, at least from a distance it did.

to post a picture do you have to have it on a website already?  If not, I'd like to know how to do it.  couldn't find how in the FAQ section.

Here's some of the best snow we found near Unicorn.

Yeah, it has to be on the net somewhere.  Then you put the url between the codes that you can generate with the picture button above the message box in the "post reply" dialog.
If you like you can post them for free on msn where I post mine.  You can even add them to my "Tatoosh" trip if you like... you just have to register or have a msn pasport or something like that.  You'll figure it out; I did  :)

I'm going to break the picture rules once, since i figured out how to do this.  I liked this picture from Sunday, nearing the saddle on Unicorn. It was blowing, cold, and sunny, and this picture represents all that:


Allright Allen!!
Nice Shots  :D

I like that last photo! Very nice. Well done.

Good Turns, Darin

thanks!

i'm amazed at my Canon's ability to shoot directly into the sun, and expose everything right.  I'd highly recommend it.  It also starts fast, and is not too much of a battery hog, like a lot of digitals.  It's a Canon Powershot A40, and you can get em under $300 these days.

It's also small, so I'll actually carry the thing.

Allen,

  Thanks for the info. I have yet to buy a digital, I will consider this one.

Good Turns, Darin

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february-9-2003-tatoosh
ron j
2003-02-11 07:52:30