January 3, 2009, Below Arrowhead Peak

A bit concerned about snow stability and looking to avoid the anticipated crowd at Yodelin, Tyler, Lindsey, Cali and I headed up to ski what we thought would be a safe glade below the top of Arrowhead Peak off Rt. 2.

The parking area 100 m west of the Snowplow shed is open and well-plowed. We left from there and headed up up the forest service road leading up to Arrowhead Peak. We broke trail up the road for a while until arriving at a nice glade in the basin well below the summit. We ended up taking 3 laps up and down the glade on various aspects (each > 500 ft of vertical), finding nice soft snow and lots of good turns. No stability issues as there were plenty of small, but well spaced trees to make for good turns but little in the way of buried snags to grab your skis. We didn't encounter any of the bad snow described in a report from the Snoqualmie Pass from the day before and saw no one else the entire day.  There was probably about a foot of powder on top of a firmer layer but no buried crust.

We left in a pretty good skin track and lots of untracked terrain. Cali was a bit wiped from all of the laps and her incessant  postholing and needed a bit of a lift on the way down.