TR Replies
Had a similar experience 3 years ago on this line. We bailed due to instability. It's especially tricky in that the windows for it are narrow most years.
FB TAY seems to be a problem. I would guess these forums see 1/10th or less of the traffic the FB group does.
I would encourage anyone to think twice about posting TRs of committing lines that are infrequently skied on the FB group. Having to do old school research often separates the prepared from the unprepared....
Over 10K in a day is a lot no matter who you are! Good job!
Haven't found any crampons that fit a size 13 snowboard boot, even the widest grivels with extender bar "made for snowboard boots." Alas.
I wouldn’t bet on trees or pow any more this season; my money is on sun-kissed open slopes and AM steeps from this point.
Do you think north facing aspects (kendall, snoqualmie, etc) will survive today's warm up? Hard to tell when the freezing levels go to 7k...
How's it holding up, and how was the descent condition? Also, what was the road/parking/approach like? I'm trying to get out there soon.
Ha ha looks like fun. Perfect ski dog (with short legs). Beautifully composed photos.
Cool poochotographs : )
Mossy is da boss!
Damn - well done! Both the trip and the video. Thanks for the inspiro, guys!
Thanks! Of course, videos take too long to make haha - I should be better about posting TRs regularly without needing the multimedia experience. But, here we go!
Wow! Now thats a classic, but modern, TAY Trip Report. Nicely climber and skied, and beautifully presented! Well done!
Well I showed up after the storm today, and things were interesting. The snow was still cold in the afternoon, and skied good.3-4” at the lower elevations. Of course ridges were windblown but very turnable. I went in at the middle entrance and nobody was there or at the Tronson Road entrance. Just snowmobiles parked in the snowpark.
@Bigeo, hopefully when youre cremated they can use the skis as a nice little box for the ashes, it would be a nice touch!
Yeah I find that snow gets packed in seemingly every part of these bindings, and then, assuming its below freezing out, it freezes everything solid. Spring touring has treated me really well in them because you can THRASH but so far winter and SkiMo has rendered them frozen and dangerous. Is it worth bringing a thermos of hot water for them? probably not?&...
I want the sticker - "Mossy Would Go"
Strong work and beautiful pics. I have done that tour 3 times and never summited. Next time . . . I know what you mean about the climb out of the White Salmon drainage to the ski area. If it weren't for cold beer waiting at the car, my body would be somewhere on that slope. I have used just about every iteration of the Fritschis starting with the Titanals. I have never had an issue with them "freezing up" other than wet snow getting packed into that stupid red plate under the heel...
Thanks @David-Koelle! Definitely some cornices on the east side of the ridge, you can see them in the background on my first photo. Tried to navigate our best above/below them and balance wet loose concerns to get to the backside. We weren't comfortable following the ridge in a section because it narrowed and you had to travel on top of those eastfacing overhung cornices in the center right of my photo, so we dropped into the bowl and gained the ridge again at a higher section where the snow...
Great! Cornice concerns at the ridge? Talk to me about the ski down the west side of the Annette outlet creek to the Iron Horse trail! Thanks
Not really, there are several snowboard boots on the market with the crampon heel cup. Such as Deeluxe, Thirty-two, and Nitro. Your alternative is to purchase the universal strap. (back piece) for your crampon.
Great work! I'm curious if you needed / used boot crampons to climb up the couloir. I'm a splitboarder and wondering if I'd need to go with my mtnrg boots, since I can't use crampons on my snowboard boots. Thanks!
OK, I'll add to the comment fest : ) Chatting with Mike about this and many other things in the past, I'm going to go on a limb to say he posed it as more of a rhetorical juxtaposition than a true question to be answered. Many of us struggle with this topic, and, let's be honest, it will never get a resolution as life goes on, and things evolve with or without us.
The value of the TAY site is the longevity of the content, and, I hope, the quality, too, compared to other online options...
Well, looks like your trip is off to a great start. Looking forward to some other reports. Best of luck, stay safe.
awesome ski and great photos! Thanks for the report!
@Jim bummer to hear that. I guess the sun while we were out worsened the crust. The skinning was pretty rough I agree.
This has been a discussion for as long as I have followed tay. My belief is it doesn’t matter what you post or don’t post, google earth and aerial photos reveal most lines for those who care to look. Unless you brap, we aren’t getting any greater access to the mountains, people have been skiing from the same trailheads for as long as the highway passes have existed. Better to be supportive of a larger community that advocates for greater access (e.g. x-country, brapmobiles, bikers, basically...
We were up there the next day for some type 2 fun. Turned around short of the summit due to sun going down. Shadowy flat light and icy breakable crust up high, then side slipped most of the the way down through the trees. Great views, but crap skiing for us.
"the magic of the PNW can come out when you least expect it"
For sure! As my buddy says, you don't know until you go : ) And same here, despite my numerous tours at the Pass, somehow I've been missing out on the Bryant Col ... so, thanks for the inspiro!
As someone who was born after '85, I've been a huge fan of TAY since I moved here. I was lucky to have some of you 'old farts' show me around when I first moved here, and I agree that it is an amazing resource if you're willing to spend the time and do your research. From what I can tell speaking to my other millennial friends, most of them use TAY on facebook, not this site. But as anyone can tell you, TAY sticks to trip reports and trip research while facebook...not so much. For the most pa...
None of our turns looked like this! Those pictures Mike took of me are strictly poser shots!
Wonderful TR, photos and the reality of "wap" at different parts.😀
Lets kick everyone off TAY that was born after 85' and they can all have the facekook and instafame and let us old farts complain about the good ol days in peace!
March 18th, 2021... Interesting reading these old TR's.
As of this date, I'm 63 and at the time we did this trip, I was 51. Back then, no thought was given to working all day, drive for 3 hours, start hiking /skinning for 9 miles with skis, tent, winter gear, rope, sleeping bags, etc.
Camp in the dark, then get up early, do some serious frozen snow skinning (too thin/punchy for crampons, to hard and frozen for skins) ... but we did it- scary. Then a f...
In contrast to TAY, social media lets me have a private account where most (not all) people who see my posts are actual friends who I hang out with in real life from time-to-time. So I think that making a post there causes less of a TAY effect than making a post here. Although some of those "friends" are pretty hardcore frothers that are gobbling up every bit of information they can find.
I definitely think before posting to this forum. I don't want my favorite spots to become more ov...
I'm sure the Swiss have. :)
Word of mouth in the previous generations would be my guess. The internet just kicked up the spread a few orders of magnitude. My guess is viewership here is down as the spread on FB and IG has largely taken over and multiplied it once more.
I agree with you, not a unique phenomenon but hard to argue the internet didn't usher in a drastically quicker method of spread.
On a tangent, I'd imagine the advent of better and better gear that makes...
It looks to me like viewership is down on this forum, not up.
What do you all think caused the "overcrowding" in the 70's, or the 00's? Is that cause better or worse than one of our current causes, the Internet? I am legitimately curious.
I think the moment we are in now is less unique than we believe. I imagine that the Swiss have been having this same conversation about their own mountains for hundreds of years.
He's probably not the only one that realizes their past posting has been part of the problem. I'm in that camp. I wish we had foreseen what would happen. In the time period you highlight, it was a much much smaller community and viewership. Indeed massive population growth is the real issue, but the tipping point i would really point to was the social media explosion. It went from websites with increasing visitation to mass spread.
Gen Z and millenials are not the issue (hey, I'm marr...
Part of me understands where you mikerolfs coming from but most of me doesn't. There have been many to ski these mountains before us and many who will ski them after us. The population is growing. There is no use getting upset about it. Mikerolfs has probably posted trip reports on this website so that contributes to this problem. I guess next time just withhold the location when writing a trip report.
Erik
At its core, this forum seems to contain the largest collection of high-quality backcountry skiing trip reports for the PNW, and serves as a platform for the creation of new TRs. I enjoy scrolling through TRs from Hummel, Sky, and others from 10 or 15 years ago. It is inspirational to say the least.
I am trying to understand where folks like...
And the guidebook in question published that route after it was posted on...yup, the internet.
Even skiing another route in the valley, they would have come across the huge gaggle of people forming the congo line to get in the route of question. If you are somebody that enjoys a modicum of solitutude, that still sucks.
It bewilders me how much people will defend against the clear fact that internet route sharing has made for crowding in many areas where there otherwise wouldn'...