MisterMo

Another for Shuksans, in all snow conditions. In fairness I have only limited basis for comparison. I want to take a run or two on some Baker (lights?) but am not having much luck finding them as demos.

44, about a dozen of which involved skinning up.

I've had a Feathered Friends "I forget the model" model summer weight bag for about twenty years. Wonderful bag. Holding up very well. Kept me warm when water bottles froze solid in the tent. Weighs about as much as a bag of potato chips. Still made domestically in Seattle Area I'm told. Good people, good stuff. :tup: :tup:

That's the spirit. It doesn't get much worse than skinny skis on junk snow in the woods. The sastrugi will seem like butter.....

Great pictures. I bet that slide has cousins all over the Cascades. There sure are a lot of monster crowns out there, some in places I've never seen before.

If your skis are pretty stubby I bet the boots won't be that much of an issue. It will add spice compared to your downhill stuff........ If you can ski from the base of Panorama to the parking lot you can ski from Muir to the top of Pan. I doubt the issue will be the steepness but rather the snow conditions. Sorry, but from a skiing perspective the Muir snowfield is all too often the most godforsaken sidehilly wind-rippped satruginous shithole on earth. There are alternatives: across the way in the N facing bowls of the Tatoosh it's usually a nice day for something although you have to do laps to get the same vertical. As far as skiing in your climbing boots, learn the survival stuff soon if you haven't already. I mean kick turns and stem turns. If you can confidently do those you can ski most snow conditions and slopes except maybe narrow slots wearing Converse all-stars if you have to. There's plenty of time for the fancy stuff to come later.

Forty years of notched tails has yielded zero delaminations or other regrets. I can't see a purpose for twin tips for regular old skiing, but they appear to be taking over the world. For touring and deep snow skiing I also think the current rage of low, super blunt tips are a step backwards. I don't think they stay up as well as the pointy high ones either breaking trail up or coming down.

It won't be anything like that. It's pretty soggy right this instant. I think Monday is supposed to be a nice day for something....sun and stratospheric freezing levels depending on who you ask.

No public hearing I'm aware of. Such things generally fall under administrative decisions and powers delegated somewhere in the RCWs and are rumored locally to have floated north from somewhere in Olympia. No Parking at the fan house (Jim Hill) is pretty much a non-issue when the snow melts since there's nothing people do there when the snow melts. The no pedestrians/no hitchhiking thing from Tunnel Creek to Yodelin seems to be a winter only thing.

Straying a bit from the original topic maybe, but the ski patrol (and ski area management) do have the say over what happens in the area under their jurisdiction...in this case within the ski area boundary. They can close portions of the area for a number of reasons and yank the tickets or trespass those who violate those closures. Those powers end at the area boundary. Except for specified areas and reasons there is no preclusion from the general public being on FS land anywhere at any time. To me the thing that is being violated by access and parking restrictions along US2 is the sense of what the highway is for. I believe US 2 should maintained as a road where one along which one may walk or bike safely and be allowed numerous areas to pull off and...recreate...for lack of a better word.

2008 Outback. 2.5L 4 cyl. Automatic. 25MPG, or a little less, on the daily up and down Stevens Pass. 30-31 MPG road trippin'. That's on real snow tires, studded and siped. On my summer rubber I do a little better.

The DOT is pretty much systematically posting every parkable spot between about Skykomish and Cole's corner as "No Parking" And then there's the inane No HItchhiking zone between Yodelin and Tunnel Creek. I think the time's past due for some concerted lobbying effort to bring pressure to reverse these situations. I'm willing to put time and effort into that if there's interest.

Monroe High School (you see it from 522) 17001 Tester Road, Monroe Tuesday Feb 12, 6-8:30 PM Area includes a big chunk of land between about the top of the wall and Ragged Ridge, also a whole bunch of stuff N and E of Gold Bar.

There aren't a whole lot of worse places to be than the N peak of Index when the sun hits. It rarely, barely, stays cold enough up there. Catch one of those nasty, grey overcast days in a cold snap, though, and stuff stays glued on a lot better.

Number 4 is Richard Nixon.

Link Here with pictures of the avalanche.

Same issue, different agency. SR2 nuttiness is courtesy WSDOT and WSP. Pretty much every place you can pull off SR2 between Skykomish and Berne Camp is posted either No Parking or 15 Minute Parking only, presumably in the name of "safety". Tunnel Creek is not a crime. Neither, I guess, is Wenatchee Bowl. Time, maybe to work to restore an attitude that highways should be places where people can pull off and do things.

I had this discussion eons ago with an engineer/skier named Chuck Loughney. His take on the subject, conversationally anyhow, was that no, there's more to it than ski surface area. He raised the idea of what he called pitching moment and cited that in the extreme you could have a ski 7 feet wide and 4 inches long which would be pretty worthless. My own experience is that (I think anyhow) in bottomless stuff on short fat skis I have to pay closer attention to my fore/aft weighting than I used to on on skinny ones. This would sort of bear out Chuck's hypothesis but it could easily be just my imagination.

I got sucked into a long stretch of too deep/too flat terrain last week on my new/modern/wide/blunt tipped/fairly short skis and while I was busting my ass horsing those things up out of the thigh deep drifts I found myself really missing my pointy tipped 215's which I think would have enabled a much better coasting/slogging ratio.

Correct. The slide took out one of the buildings on the north side of the highway. There were death(s) but I don't remember how many. With tree growth over the years there is now only one active slide path on that hillside whereas the whole thing was once pretty barren. Tye-Mill at Stevens and High Campbell at Crystal Mountain are the original Yodelin lifts. Discoveries made when we rebuilt Tye Mill in 1999 led us to believe that the lift was erected somehere else prior to Yodelin but nobody seems to know where. Lots of good turns to be had anywhere between Yodelin and Big Chief Mountain for sure............

The normal summer trail to Spray Park traverses a section or two of extremely steep timber that could be an issue depending on conditions and abilities. It also crosses a major slide path below Hessong Rock just before entering the meadows.

With the forty-eight inch bar, yes?

Real chains.

P185/70 R14 87Q studded snow tires Fit 99 Legacy and god knows what else Four of em. Lots o' tread; probably get you through this winter and next. Sixty bucks and they're yours. Also a set of chains to fit that size tire. Never out of the box. $20?

I think I would ignore those charts & like was said elswhere here get some cheap used stuff & use that as your baseline for the next pair. I think the only real downside I have found to the stubby skis is breaking trail where I have to work harder to horse the tips up out of the local cottage cheese to move ahead. This seems like more of a project than it was with my 215's which stayed more on top.