The last couple of days had brought quite some new snow to the region. So after enduring an interesting avalanche course on Saturday, Bram and I decided to head out for some real skiing. It definitely was time for our November turns. Due to easy access we decided to go skiing on Mt. Baker’s Heliotrope ridge again. The advantage is the glaciated area, that offers a good base for early turns.
While we drove up the forest service road, we were really surprised about he amount of snow. At one point we had to leave the car at the side of the road, because there was no way to go further with our Legacy.
That's as far as we could drive
So we parked the car and started skinning right away. It was about a kilometer to the trail head. We could even skin up the trail through the trees. Only some of the creeks were not completely covered. As soon as we hit the junction to the glacier and Heliotrope Ridge, we had to break trail through some 40 cm of fresh snow. So be climbed up to the ridge in variable visibility, just to ski down in varying visibility as well. It wasn’t really cold but very windy in times. At the bottom of the glacier we put our climbing skins back on and climbed up to the ridge again.
It was quite windy at times
It still was very windy and the visibility still was not the greatest. The snow pack was a little wind packed but still good to ski. We followed some ski tracks down and were amazed, that they led directly to the trail. It was possible to ski almost the entire trail. Only close to the trail head we took our skies off for a short distance to spare the base of the skies from some scratches.
All in all it was an amazing day of skiing that early in the season. And it was Bram’s turn to finish his turns all year. It had up to 70 cm of fresh snow on the glacier and almost all the terrain up on the ridge is ski-able. Some amazing turns on an amazing day.
As usual, carying skis
More pictures can be found here.