Barlow Butte - the mother of all bushwhacks 1/14/01
Now I know that there's a reason that Barlow Butte doesn't show up in the BC skiing book for Oregon, there's no beta online about skiing it, and gets only a mention in the local XC skiing book.
Bunch of new overnight. About 12-13 inches. Started being snow on the ground & road just outside of Sandy - about 1000 ft. Drove up to the Barlow Pass Sno-Park, the pooch and I were the 1st ones up there (there were about 20 cars there when we returned). The snow quality was really nice - drier than the stuff we usually get around here. Started to skin at around 7am.
Lost about 200 feet in a short descent before starting to climb. Followed a pretty heavily used XC ski trail initially, but Coop and I were the 1st out so we were breaking trail in about a foot of the stuff. Cooper actually did some of the trail-breaking work! I just followed in his tracks whenever I could, though his route was sometimes indirect . . . with the occasional smattering of the yellow.
| Cooper breaking trail for me |
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Finally got to where I would have guessed the junction with the trail to the summit would have been but naturally it's not evident under all this new snow.
So I figure - traverse. Start laying out a big traverse skin track up the mountainside, right-left-right-left, fully expecting to run into the main trail at some point. 2 hrs later I'm at the summit after completing the mother of all bushwhack ascents complete with sidestepping, sideslipping, deadfall negotiation, and painful stop-motion prat falls. I'd been looking at doing this spot for a while because topo info. showed a solid 1000 vertical foot clearing on the SW aspect from the summit down toward the valley below. Thought it might set up a good yo-yo spot to set a skin track and spend a day. Turns out there are some clearings there - just cliffed out from the summit and then abruptly (300 vert below) snuff out into some monster trees.
| One of the clearings/rockslides on the SW aspect |
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| Ummm... not a lot of turns here... |
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So - I've done this jungle climb complete with copious dumpage from doug firs down the neck, there seem to be no turns to be had, and I'm being mocked by one of the sickest powder days we've had in a long long time. Hmmmmm.
I start down the SW ridge from the summit just looking for an escape route, hoping that the trail I was looking for from the base would be obvious from the top. It wasn't. The cruise down the SW ridge isn't entirely unpleasant - the deep snow is great.
| Traveling down through the trees on the SW ridge |
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Pretty soon I happen upon this BIG semi-open shot that seems to follow a drainage all the way down to the valley 1000 feet below. I poke it for about 4-5 really NICE turns with powder coming up to chest level and stop. Problems: it goes all the way down there on a SE bearing (I need to be going NW - following it would have added a mile - easily more to my retreat), it's intermittently choked by this nasty brush stuff, and I'm by myself and don't want to do this shot alone after this big dump we've just had. So I backtrack/traverse and regain the ridgeline.
| Coop doing some routefinding on the ridgeline |
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And so ensues the absolute mother of all gorilla-survival-skiing- bushwhack-just get me the hell out of here descents. There was never any idea of being lost or disoriented - just imagine the ascent I described above, only going downhill, with more trees and sticks and crap, and faster. There were turns . . . only just one at a time with lots of whacking intervening.
| Not the skiing I had in mind |
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My biggest fear was a high-speed poke in the eye, funny thing was I never put on my goggles. Brilliant. I finally bottom out on the Barlow Road in the valley at 10:45.
The tromp out and up (had to climb about 400 vert over about a mile) to the rig on this slowly climbing road is nice. Somehow the day still manages to rank. All the deep snow, some surreal scenery with intermittent sunshine, and the absurdity of it somehow put it over the top. Must be the drug- like stupor that any day out in it seems to spot you.......