[TR] Ruby Mountain - North side 05/07/2018

[Alisse]

Trip: Ruby Mountain - North side

Trip Date: 05/07/2018

Trip Report:

After many phone calls and texts and posts on many forums, I successfully found a poor victim  a partner for skiing Ruby yesterday! Thank you Chris!!

I woke up at 12:15 AM and drove to meet Chris at the Gorge Lake Campground, we carpooled from there over to the highway closure/Ross Lake Resort trailhead. We left the car at 3:45 AM to take our skis for a bit of a walk up the snow-free trail. We had an OK time route-finding through the forested hillsides and probably couldn't have done it much faster even with a more direct line. We ended up starting to skin around 4,000' if I remember correctly.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!!! The weather was a bit cloudier than expected (but that was a good thing for the snow/avy concerns). 

Google Photos auto-stich! A little off, but I'll take it..
 

Once we were supposedly in sight of Ross Lake, the lake and surrounding mountains were completely socked in -- but eventually it opened up quite a bit more and we got some good views! The cornice was not as threatening or overhanging as it could have been. We got up to the summit at 9:00 exactly. The summit repeat/antenna thing was weird. We saw a box of cartridges at the top and wondered about that. What I think must have been Redoubt Glacier -- WOW. And I saw a very big, far-off mountain that I thought maybe was Slesse, but it was too far east to be Slesse. Not sure. Directly north of us.

There were sort of mixed reviews/experiences for the latest ski trip reports coming out of the general area, so I was keen to see what we would encounter (maybe, somehow, possibly there would be amazing frozen snow on the way up?). It ended up being a sort of mediocre wet kind of snow that was sticky but not as bad as it could have been! Not terrible for skinning, not terrible for skiing. The line that we took down was conservative -- we stayed on the ridge that we took to ascend, mellow terrain. Just one little slough that turned into a really small loose wet. No roller balls sighted, one natural tiny loose wet slide off the rocks far, far away from us.
  

We took a better way down through the woods and found that we could have been skinning from around 3,300'.... not too much slide alder/open creek to contend with right now.

 

Somehow I lost my little metal loop thing off my ski boot (for the leash) and also the plastic protector thing for my whippet! Not sure how that happened. I failed at LNT...

We got back to the car at noon. It was full-on sunny and beautiful and Colonial and friends (and all the rest) were looking so good! Chris just happened to have some Pacifico beers in a cooler (!) in his car and that was a great way to end things.

 

This trip fed my soul!!!

 

Thanks to a different Chris (https://chasingmastery.com/) for the GPX track :-)

Lessons:
- Don't plan on wearing ski boots for the entire thing and then as you leave the car decide not to do that, and decide to start on in the Chacos that you have on your feet. Don't try to switch back into the Chacos while you're still on steep duffy forest slopes.

Gear Notes:
Carried aluminum crampons but did not need them one iota

Approach Notes:
Follow your nose south :-)

[JasonG]

Excellent @Alisse, glad you found a willing person to suffer with you.  That is an EARLY start! Wow!  I often don't start skinning until 8 or 9, but I guess I like my sleep too much.

And, do you have a photo of the mountain in question?  I'm guessing you're talking about Hozomeen.

[Alisse]

I also like my sleep @JasonG but with the freezing level being so high for so long, we wanted to be up top early. A lot of this route is on a ridge, though, on very moderate slopes. I guess you might already know that.

Looking at maps, it could definitely have been Hozomeen, but it looked further away? Here's a pic:

Edited May 9, 2018 by Alisse

[JasonG]

True, early does mitigate some of the hazard.

Yep, that's the north peak of Hozomeen.  The right skyline is a recommended route, provided you find someone to lead the first bit!

[Alisse]

@JasonG Let me know when you want to go climb it again ☺