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Snoqualmie Pass Conditions


John Frieh

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The obvious gully on the NW shoulder of Guye Peak was in decent shape this past Sunday. Three steps of thick-enough ice with heinous wallowing (even w/snowshoes!) above and below. Bring shorter screws and a baby angle. There are a couple small pillars on the left gully wall, too. You might still be able to use our tracks wink.gif

 

Nice pillar at the end of the technical part

73623792_0de100c691.jpg

 

The obvious gully

73623794_1a506452cc.jpg

Edited by slothrop
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For people thinking of doing this, stick to the tracks as they are solid. Cheers for the hard work guys. bigdrink.gif

The route is good fun, but at least one of the pillars from the left wall has fallen into the gulley. You'll see it when you get up to it.

And it has a nice tree move to finish!

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Alpental falls is climbable through the step. The snow down low was kind of rotten/snowy on the surface low angle stuff. The upper step had some running water behind it, making things a little bit spicier.

 

What might be the Alpental Strasse Pillar in the book was looking really fat from the road. The north facing stuff in general looked really good.

 

alpweb.jpg

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Plenty of good ice to be had at Alpental on Saturday.

580PC170007-med.JPG

This looked like a pretty interesting line with a great finish. Full Size The start is on the left as the right is a thin shell with water flowing beneath. Not sure about the center section, but the top looked great. Very little snow on Chair Peak, but some interesting looking drips around the south shoulder and Bryant.

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Alpental falls is climbable through the step. The snow down low was kind of rotten/snowy on the surface low angle stuff. The upper step had some running water behind it, making things a little bit spicier.

 

What might be the Alpental Strasse Pillar in the book was looking really fat from the road. The north facing stuff in general looked really good.

 

alpweb.jpg

 

We took the line up the middle on Saturday. There was a lot of water running behind it, but the ice was plastic and took picks and points well. Protection was mostly stubbies with a couple of 13's.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm probably going to be heading up in the area over the weekend and will post information on what I see.

 

Good news is that it has been consistentantly below freezing since early Christmas morning with the temps not rising above 31 degrees in the past few days. Now, of course this if from the 5400' station on the top of Alpental. It has been hovering right around freezing since monday evening lower down, so I'm sure things have been melting out.

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Nothing is "in". We toured the Source Lake Basin looking for some ice. Alpental Falls was completely melted out. The smears along the summer Source Lake trail were out as well. We headed back in the Winter trail and all that ice is non-climable. There were a couple of areas on the left of the winter trail as you are headed in ot Source Lake that could get some ice if we had a few days of cold.

 

The only climable ice we saw was along I-90 West. Even it looked rotten and thin.

 

Sorry for the bad news y'all.

 

Lots of heavy powder up there. Skiing on the two open runs at Alpental must be pretty good right now.

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No ice to speak of up to 5000 feet on the west side of Snoqualmie Mt. on Sunday Jan. 8, 2006. Snow was mostly well consolidated up to 5000 feet. There was a thin layer of damp new snow on top of heavy breakable crust on top of older powder. There was lumpy avalanche debris snow in just about of all of the avalanche glades; it looks like everything slid last week. On the lee side (north exposure) of the "valley" below Cave Ridge at 5000 feet there started to be a significant (10 inches or more) top layer of powder and temps were cold enough to be preserving the pow at 5000 feet.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A buddy of mine and I tried approaching

Chair Peak today (had ideas of trying

the NE Butt or NF). Tons of soft snow

low down. We were breaking trail pretty

much from the parking lot. After

struggling for about 2.5 hours, we

gained a paltry 700 ft of elevation mad.gif.

I wish I had the extenders for my MSR

Denali snowshoes. As such, I was

sinking till my knees most of the

time, even when I tried following the

snowshoe tracks of my friend. We gave up

promptly, and settled for a morning beer

before driving back home.

 

The snow was deep and soft, but at

least I was sinking till my waist

regularly grin.gif.

 

Driving your car for eight hours and

taking your gear for a couple of hours

of snowswim could only be classified as

stupid alpine training smile.gif.

 

PS: It was not snowing much at all when we

were there. The snow did not show any

signs of instability either (as far as we

went). So, maybe some brave soul could use

our tracks to lighten their workload tomorrow.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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