January 18, 2004, Snoqualmie Crust Survey
1/18/04
WA Snoqualmie Pass
3030
2
Skip, Yanna, Russ and I toured from ~2700 to ~5700. There was between 1" and 4" of new wet snow on a crust. The crust was pretty firm in open areas above about 3K, but was nastily breakable in the woods for a ways higher. At the higher elevations, the crust in the woods was firm but quite lumpy. The skiing in the open areas was quite smooth, fun, and fast, making even fairly low angled slopes amusing. On steeper slopes the first skier down would propagate huge fans of rolling snowballs that lumped up the slope. It snowed, misted, and sleeted on us during the day, but only really started raining on the drive down from the pass.
Definitely a day when those seldomly used ski crampons would have come in handy. I fell more times on the way up than I did on the way down!
We had a good opportunity to compare the effectiveness of skin wax to untreated skins to silicone spray. Russ seemed to fare well in terms of snow sticking with the spray (though he also slipped out on the hard surface several times, as he noted), Skip had freshly waxed skins and was walking the high white heels at many points, and pretty much the same for me with skins that had not treatment since late last season. Yanna's skins were largely untreated and had some sticking but not quite as bad as Skip and me.
Russ still has to pass us the name of the spray he uses, as you don't want a spray with any petroleum products in it.
Russ still has to pass us the name of the spray he uses, as you don't want a spray with any petroleum products in it.
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