Rainy Pass skiing - April 1st
Phil, Bill and Greg go skiing near Rainy Pass.
Rugged scenery along the way
The route in to the side valley takes us through the infamous "Doug-Sanders-tries-to-get-a-GPS-reading clearing". Memories come back. The way is much easier with snowcover though, and the river crossing is still bridged by snow.
Bill performing some technical skinning
The snow consists of a little dry powder down in the trees. Out of the trees, there is more fresh snow, but it has been baked by the sun into wet "powder", on top of slush. At higher elevations, the snow consists of a foot of dry powder, on top of a foot of slush, on top of a hard base. Interesting skiing.
We attempt to cross a gentle 7000ft ridgeline, but are thwarted by wind-loaded slopes.
Whoooomp! "Uh, Greg, did you here that?"
"[nervous laugh] yeah. let's get out of here"
Nonetheless, we enjoy the scenery, and begin the descent. We try to wait for periods of sunshine so we don't have to deal with flat light.
Greg trying to enjoy the powder
We decide to take a slightly different way down. For some reason, I had a desire to get cliffed out. Perhaps because we had turned around somewhat early (because we decided it was unsafe to cross the ridge line into another bowl, and we didn't know what else to do), and there was still a lot of daylight left, I thought we needed some more adventure. And I drag Greg and Bill along with me. They manage to convince me that we shouldn't head down into the adjacent unknown drainage, which appears far below (must be some cliffs or something). Instead we head straight down. I know there's cliff bands somewhere, because we had to head way left on the way up to get around them. Then... cliff-o-rama! We can see our approach tracks several hundred feet below, but you would need to be a hardcore crazy Euro skier to get to them directly. I suggest we head left into unknown terrain. Bill suggests we head right, towards where we came up. I am beginning to feel guilty, so we head right. The cliffband rises to the right, and the trees are dense - so it's left we go - yes!
The terrain mellows, and we relax. We find a nice spot of open forest with some dry powder to crank a few turns. Then everything gets steep again. Woohoo! I suggest we head down left into the deep drainage - I'm sure I can see some flat terrain below. The others want to head back right. Right is too brushy, and besides, I'm already side slipping down into a little slot creek. I must be careful, because the snow is sliding off the slope, and it's somewhat of a terrain trap. I cross, and I'm on a narrow ridge between two drainages. The others follow. The main drainage to the left looks steep! Greg and Bill want to go right again, but it's now too hard to cross the mini-drainage again without skinning back up. We sideslip down steep dense slopes left, into a partly open creek bed in a little gorge. Eventually it mellows out and we emerge on a gentle avalanche swath a few hundred feet above our morning tracks. Everyone thinks the way we came down was their "fault". Cool!
We speed along our morning tracks, Greg recovers his gloves (which he'd absent-mindedly left at a rest break on the way in), and we reach the car about 45 minutes later.