The Slot 12/20/00
Location unknown....
Meet up with Matt at 6:30am in Hood River. Original plan was to hit the White River Canyon pretty much just to do an avalanche clinic b/c the skiing as of the night before looked as if it was going to be pretty bad. No new snow for quite a while and temps had been cold - I was thinking conditions were going to pretty rock hard ("...hard as the back of God's head" as Matt says). When I cruise through the Gorge on the way out, however, it is mixed rain and snow by the time I reach Cascade Locks. A peek at the weather before I left the house made it look like some unexpected moisture had swung in (was supposed to be clear and cold overnight). Matt thinks we ought to give this shot we've been looking at for a couple of years a poke just to scope out the line - even if we don't get any skiing done. I agree - if we're just going up there to do beacon drills and dig some pits shouldn't matter where we do them. Didn't figure we were going to get any turns in no matter where we went.
We start the drive up out of Hood River and once we get to the upper Hood
River Valley the snow starts coming down. The climb up to our stopping
point is snowy all the way with a coating of white on the road surface
by the time we park.
"Pretty much a total misread on the weather."
"Dust on crust!" Matt adds.
We start out the approach to the base of the climb.
The lower pitch is an old clearcut complete with stumps and little shortie trees but there are a couple of tight skiable lines in there. Will be some gorrilla-survival skiing on the way down today but another few feet of snow will make this pitch a beauty. The snow is continuing to fall and the surface is maybe an inch of new by now. Surprisingly the crust underneath isn't as beefy as we had thought it was going to be. The skiing here should be doable. We ascend the field about 500 vertical feet and then make a short traverse to the base of a much longer snowfield - is actually a rockslide area and the snowpack is still not all that generous so there are some pointers sticking up here and there in the wind-scrubbed areas. The pitch looks good, though - a good continuous line that holds about 35 degrees. We lay down a traversing skin track and make it to the top of this pitch.
| The hoodoo hideaway - trees heavily laden with the fresh |
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Traverse over through some woods to the main shot - a continuous fall line of about 800 vertical feet - again over a rockslide area so the pitch is the magic angle of repose - about 33-35 degrees. Really a mind-blowing shot. I knew it was going to be good when Matt popped out of the organic traverse to the open area and his head angle looking up the slope was as high as a star-gaze!! We stop and do a couple of beacon drills here - burials of 4 feet on a slope of 35 degrees make location more challenging than previous drills we've done. Waist-deep postholing during the fine search makes things a little more interesting as well. The DTS Tracker outperforms my expertise - a couple more practice sessions and I'll be more finely tuned. We dig a pit here. The layers from the top down are: 2 inches new over a very thin crust then about 6 inches over a much tougher crust then a good 30 inches or so from the weekend storm cycle that is a pretty styrofoamy (and impressive) single slab - below this is the meager beginning of the season coverage that is not real substantial - about a foot of snow but with pretty solid anchoring over rocks. A Rutschblock test gives a failure about 6 inches down (the newer snow since the big weekend storm) on 2 jumps.
We continue on the way up and approach the top of the ridge just short of 6000 feet. Just before we top out Matt digs a hasty pit and finds a pretty easy shear at about 10 inches down - corresponds with the same shear at 6 inches down that we saw about 1000 vertical feet lower. Snow has really started picking up as well so we decide to do another Rutschblock - this time get a failure at that 10 inch layer after 1 jump. Not a super easy failure but not super stable either. Numerous repeated jumps to get the much larger layer to fail (now 40+ inches thick at elevation) don't make an impression - the layer doesn't even crumble.
We make the ridgetop under more heavily falling snow about 2200 feet above the rig. Visibility is pretty poor up here but I know there's a lake in the drainage behind us and some pretty stunning ridgetop scenery all around - unfortunately we're reduced to seeing only what's within about 1/4 mile of us. We hang out there for an appropriate amount of time for the Cliff Bar and now mandatory jerky consumption. The anticipation of the shot below us is nice. The continuous snow has given us a pretty good salvage and actually made this a respectable powder day.
We make our way across to the top of the first pitch and make about a dozen or so turns in some really nice fresh before we get pinched out and have to knock our way through about 10 yards of trees to the top of the MEGA-MUTHA . . . a pitch of about 800 vertical feet with all this new on top - maybe 15-20 yards wide and a consistent 35 degrees. I put down about 30 nice turns on this beautiful virgin surface and stop and check my work - a couple of the turns feature complete loss of contact with the snow before the next turn iniates . . . which is nice. I scope Matt as he lays down some sweet turns on his Split board. We trade off alternating first tracks two more times before this field squeezes off and we have to make our traverse back to the second slide area.
| Woodsy traverse |
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Fears of poor coverage lower down here don't play out as we put our mark on this snow field hemmed in by trees. The bottom of this pitch squeezes off and we traverse to the top of the clear cut. Some lines reveal themselves to us despite the gnarly stumps and shorties that are still sticking up and we make our way down to the base of the ridge grinning.
NICE !!!!