March 2, 2008, Lichtenberg Mountain

Headed up with my friends Anna, Jack, Lori and Jeff to do Lichtenberg Mountain today, approaching from the Smith Brook Road side. The ski up the road was no problem as some tracks had already been laid in the 4-5 inches of new snow on the ground. At the first hairpin, we left the road and had no trouble finding a good creek crossing. We ended up working a bit too far up the valley before starting the climb up to Lichtenwasser Lake. As a result, after nice easy climbing through the forest, we found ourselves doing some pretty steep sidehilling for a bit. Eventually we ran into a set of snow shoe tracks going straight up the steep hill so we took off the skis and booted up the last 100 feet of that bad section. Once above that we found easy skinning on 6-8 inches of soft snow for the rest of the approach to the lake. Took a little break there where we met a father and his son who came up just behind us.

Given the new snow and loading of the slopes above the lake, we opted to follow the ridge on the SW side of the lake up to the summit. The snow got a little deepter up here with 8-10 inches of very light, new snow on top of a firm base but the skinning was pretty straightforward. The sun was poking through a lot at this point and the views along the upper ridge were quite nice, better than had we come up the valley at the end of the lake. Eventually we got up close enough to get a good look at the summit block. It didn't look too appealing from where we were on the ridge so we opted to ski around on the northwest side of it where we dropped our skis and booted up the rest of the way to the summit. After getting back down to our skis we met a group of 3 who had come up from the west side of the peak, droppped onto the slopes above Lichtenwasser Lake and then skied up the slopes out the end of the lake to where we were before heading back out to the west. We then sat down for some lunch and met another group of 3 who had come up via the slopes at the end of the lake. With lunch done, we headed down the same way those groups had come up, finding really nice powdery snow on a firm base all the way back to the lake. While stopped at the lake outlet, we looked back and caught that last group of 3 coming right off the summit block with their dog following right behind... quite impressive.

Lots of big cornices on the ridges above the southern parts of the lake. We didn't see any evidence of slide activity activity except a small old one near the top triggered by a break-off from the cornice. The top layer of new snow was pretty light and poorly consolidated in most spots where we skied along the ridge and down to the lake.

The ski down from the lake to the road was better than expected but not great. The top layer remained soft but there were just enough poorly filled in tree craters  and a mushy base to keep it sufficiently interesting. To avoid getting into that bad spot we hit on the way up, we stayed close to the creek draining from the lake, crossing to the east side of it at about 4,500 feet, finding straightforward skiing down from there. An easy ski out to the road, back in the cars... only to wait for a while because of the Sultan traffic.