July 27-30, Mt. Adams north side

My son, Adrian, had not shown much interest in skiing - "too cold" - until a couple of months ago. He has never ridden a lift and only been on skinny XC skis. We did a couple of days of skiing at Sunrise early in July and he had fun, and figured out how to control his speed, so we headed to the north side of Mt. Adams for four days to ski the gentle slopes around the Adams and Pinnacle Glaciers.

The road to Divide Camp trail was blocked by humps of snow about a half mile past Takh Lakh lake, leaving us with about a mile of road walking to the trailhead. From there, it was pretty much continuous snow all the way. We skied at first but when the route started climbing through lava steps the connections weren't so good so we hiked for a while, skiing again around 5500 feet, where the snow was smooth and consolidated. As soon as we hit the larger meadows the suncups and runnels became really bad, and were the worst I've ever seen in the area where we camped in the last trees around 6200 feet:


The snow got a lot better above 6500 feet where it was steeper, and was generally quite good on the Adams Glacier. There were many good snow highways up through the big moraines of the Adams to the central part of the glacier. One day we skied up the central Adams to the crossover at around 8000 feet and down the eastern part of the Adams toward the lake, then back. Adrian skiing on the Adams Glacier (low quality frame grab):


The next day we skied up the eastern moraine valley onto the lower Pinnacle Glacier, then came back down the western moraine valley. Some firmer snow over there on NW facing slopes - there was a solid refreeze every night even down at camp with the continuously clear skies.

Mosquitoes were present but generally not bad. At camp we found that they disappeared around 8 PM so we had late dinners. We found the
Adrian used Fisher Inbound Crown skis, no metal edges but a big 68mm shovel and massive 10mm sidecut. My skis (Atomic Sierra) had an even larger shovel at 70mm but the same sidecut, with metal edges. The "waxless" patterned bases of the skis climbed perfectly in the summer snow and we didn't take skins. We both had boots with the heavy-duty version of NNN bindings (NNN-BC). My skis were great for making parallel turns and I didn't make a single tele turn.

Adrian got pretty good at stem christies and was able to link lots of turns in a row, as well as at various survival skiing techniques which will serve him well into the future. He said the most fun part of the trip was "doing turns" (aside from the stop at DQ on the way home).