An Epic
· May 10, 05:34 PM
It started on Wednesday, when Lars, Evelyn and I were out on Tam McArthur Rim looking at the options for continuing north and trying to go around Broken Top. It looked doable, if not exactly easy. There’s plenty of snow in the Cascades right now, so some of the cliffs are just really steep slopes, and some of the steeps are actually skiable. But we’d had a leisurely start to the morning and things were getting soft. We started talking about Friday instead.
When the clouds rolled in Thursday evening I was worried. An epic ski under cloudy skies isn’t the worst thing, but unfrozen crust would have put a damper on things pretty quickly. Luckily, the temperatures were cool, and by bedtime it was already well below freezing, even with cloud cover. The forecast was perfect, with lows around 25, highs near 50 for Friday and a maximum wind of 5mph. I was a little too excited to fall asleep easily, but when I did I was pretty certain that we’d be loading up early and heading out. Sure enough, it was clear and 15 degrees at 5:50 yesterday morning, which was all the inspiration needed to throw some bacon on the stove and load up the car.
Zach, Lars and I finally headed out around 6:40 (after a quick return home for my sunglasses) and had an easy drive out to Sisters and up McKenzie pass to the snow line. We parked, left the warm-up pants behind and hit the snow at 7:30. We didn’t have an exact route or time in mind, but we knew we were getting to Bachelor, where Kristina had left the Jeep for us to drive back to Bend. Our best guess when we schemed Thursday night had us going to the west side of the North and Middle Sisters, then crossing between Middle and South, going around South, down to Green Lakes, out to Sparks and then slogging up Century on the snowmobile trail back to the parking lot. Lars thought it might be 4 hours or a little more. I was thinking more like 5, but either way it was going to be long enough to bring a pack with bladder, and not just a drinkbelt.
After 10 minutes on the snow-covered highway we hit the lava fields, and headed out onto some flawless crust. At this point I’ll just let the pictures do most of the story telling, with a little explaining when necessary.
The lava near McKenzie pass and some views. It was pretty scenic out there.
We wrapped around a cinder cone, and then had a snack and a little debate about where to go. I was all for staying west of Middle Sister (we were almost even with North at this point), but Lars and Zach prevailed on me to ski up the glacier to the pass between the two. It was a loooong climb up to 9000’, but I’m really glad they convinced me.
We finally made it to the pass, somewhere around 3:20 into the ski. 4 hours was beginning to look unlikely, and 5 was going to be a stretch. We had lunch (it was 11 after all), admired the views and then plunged off the east side and started traversing towards South Sister – which was still a long ways away.
We had to give back a lot of elevation before we climbed around South Sister. The good thing is that we had perfect corn snow, nothing too steep and got to make a lot of turns. My tele ability isn’t anywhere close to Zach or Lars, but I faked a few and had plenty of fun sliding them around parallel style.
Once we hit Green Lakes, the snow was starting to get pretty heavy. We were up to an inch and a half or two of corn every time we turned, and the climbing wasn’t very much fun. We followed the stream out to Sparks Lake, and then did the long climb back up to Bachelor. This was the only part of the ski that wasn’t actually fun while we were doing it. We’d just been out too long for the crust to hold up, the trees were making things dirty and it wasn’t very downhill. Once we hit Sparks, the climb back up Century was not nearly as bad as expected and we made it back to the car in one piece.
For the stats, it would have been a good day for a GPS, but we forgot. I spent a while trying (successfully I think) to plot it in Google Earth (things look different without snow), but I’m not sure how to share that route trace. Anyways, we made it many thousand vertical feet, at least 30 miles and were out for 6:20. Makes for a long 4 hour ski, but it was pretty sweet.
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Brayt, Can you explain a little more about the picture of the waterfall? Wouldn’t that water be REALLY cold?
— Toby Wells May 12, 04:39 AM #
You would have to ask Lars to find out just how cold it actually was, but really, really cold is probably a safe assumption. It looked like it might have been refreshing if we didn’t have an hour of skiing left at that point…
— Brayt May 12, 08:38 AM #
Man, that almost makes Lars look like a REAL Alaskan.
— ZC May 12, 12:33 PM #
Brayt, every time you post this sorta stuff Tommy and I get really jealous. Those pictures are amazing!
— Scott May 13, 12:41 PM #