May 3, 2006, Washington Pass

At the last minute, I took the day off and met up with an old friend and one of his climbing buddies to poke around the North Cascades Hwy. Originally, we were thinking about Whistler Mtn but given the weather trend and the number of wet slides, we decided to head for Washington Pass & the Blue Lake Trailhead instead.

The snow is pretty deep in the area and the snow depth on the side of the road is 5 feet or so. While the highway is open, the Blue Lake Trailhead area is not plowed clear. There is a small clearing that has been plowed out and can fit 3-4 cars. Seems like there's a solid 3 feet of snow on the road and throughout the parking lot. The restroom has a huge snow pillow on its roof.

When we arrived there was only one other car- a party of four who were headed out across the highway to the north. Of course, the weather was blue skies and steadily increasing temperatures during the day. The snow was firm through the trees and leading up to the first openings but, beyond that, the snow changed erratically. Within a short stretch, it would change from firm, to a pocket of powder, to 2" of soft snow on a firm base. Everyone in our party was having problems with skinning up but I think I had it worst. Being the resident knuckledragger, I was using some K2 Ascent skis with climbing skins and there just wasn't enough edge surface for the long side traverses. In addition to that, the angle of ascent on these things is less than full skis with skins so for the middle portion of the ascent, I basically had to hike on foot. That sucked.

The longer we stayed, the more the snow softened up. Again, the inconsistent snow made descents a little adventurous since you'd make a couple turns in some powder and then right into some firm, crusty snow. We didn't head up to the col because the cornice was pretty huge and the lone bootpack up to the top really didn't look fun. We took a couple of 500' runs down before finally heading out. Every now & then we would see a person or two but generally we had the place to ourselves. The final run out was a lot of fun, though I felt the snow starting to grab and slow down. We ended up missing the parking lot and popped out on the road about 30 yards west of the trailhead.

A great day and a fun time having the area all to yourself. The only negative came when we headed back down to the Cook Rd Park & Ride. One of our vehicles got broken into and someone ripped off a stereo so beware if you use this place as a meeting point..

EDIT: Here are some photos:

Looking up at the cornice guarding the col:



Looking across the valley at Kangaroo Ridge:



Looking down towards the highway hairpin: