Mt Shasta & Lassen

Took the opportunity of a little time off to go for a couple day multi sport mtb and ski trip in North Cal. With a new coat of snow in the alpine around Central Oregon I had high hopes of smooth skiing up high after a few days of transitioning back to corn this week. We had two awesome mtb days around Redding and town of Mt Shasta, the shuttle trails right out of Bunny Flats are rad!!

We ended up driving to Lassen and seeing a disappointingly low snow pack, we knew it'd been a rough winter but it was lower on the N side than I expected. We took a chill AM expecting to hike around the park a little, when we got to the summit trailhead we saw a couple skiers and it looked pretty good! We ended up hiking the trail to about 10k and were meet with gnarly gusts of wind that were blowing us over! It was balmy so the wind helped keep the corn from over cooking, we ended up skiing about 800ft of smoothish snow on the S side. Maybe not worth a long drive to ski, but still some fun snow down there!

After a rest mtb day, we skied Shasta via the Hotlum-Wintum route. We hit snowline around 9k and had good crampon conditions to the summit. It was impressive how much less snow there is there this year vs. last (420 snowfall last year vs. 220 this year). We dropped in around 1030, the top couple hundred feet were firm, the main "chute" portion of the upper section was gnarly 8-10 inches of mank on a firm crust. Really challenging to ski. We set off a couple small hisser wet slides. It was impressive that tons of skiers were still climbing that face as hot as it was getting. The skiing continued to be funky slow & fast till about 12k where the new snow stopped. Below 12k there was some fun fast corn skiing! Smooth in spots and bumpy in others.

A couple more hard freezes and upper mtn should be primo corn. Still some good fun to be had on Shasta, we just missed the cycle by a few days!