March 23, 2003, Nordic Pass, Silver Peak bowl

I couldn't seem to drag myself out of bed early enough to join anyone else, so headed up to Snoqualmie to explore and try to find some reasonable snow. The promised fresh snow at low FL hadn't materialized at the bottom of Hyak. I skied up a run to the ridge, then down a XC trail toward the Mill Creek bridge. I met 2 skiers who had just come down from Mt. Catherine (Greg and Bruce?), who gave me some good info on the snow and pointed me toward their skin track. I skied up that to the bottom of the cliffs, but, as is often the case, the snow seemed best in the big trees, so I traversed over to Nordic Pass, then down to Windy Pass, getting in small bunches of turns here and there. In open areas, the rain-soaked snow under the newest 3-5" was very unconsolidated and deep, but in the forest it was very firm and provided a good base for turning and touring.

I crossed the Silver Peak bowl main stream on the PCT bridge (most of the creeks I saw looked freshly opened, presumably as a result of recent rains), then skied up through the forest toward the west arm of Silver Peak bowl. Overall, the snow started getting much better above about 4000', and by the time I got to the west arm the surface snow was cold and loose and my waxless skis were not climbing very well. I booted up through the trees on the firm underlying snow to about 4700', then had a very enjoyable run down to Windy Pass on the fast, silky snow in the trees. The convergence zone seemed to finally get its act together at about this time, adding more fast snow, so when I got back up to Nordic Pass, I decided to check out the favorite east-facing run. I guess it was a little too low this time, because the underlying wet snow made turning less than optimal, even with the trees, so I used my vertical to glide back to the XC trails near Rockdale Lake. The XC trails back to Hyak were very nice, with an inch or two of fast snow on top of the groomed, and stayed nice until the last few hundred vertical above the parking lot.