[TR] Mt Hood- W,East Face 5/13/2006

[Davy_D]

Climb: Mt Hood-W,East Face

 

Date of Climb: 5/13/2006

 

Trip Report:

Started 6:30 AM in Meadows parking lot and took Texas ridge to top of Cascade lift before resort opened at 9:00. From top of lift skinned old cat track to top of superbowl at 8,800ft. Windy and icey until 10am then started to soften. From top of superbowl skinning possible but faster to boot pack with or without crampons. With teleboots crampons help for obvious reason but AT boots ok without. Snowboarder went up with MSR snowshoes no problem. Hit summit around 12:00 and corn was perfect for decent. Crevases on up reaches of W'East and superbowl not open or evident. Perfect corn on decent until around 7'000ft. Thats roughly top of casscade lift. Best decent is into heather canyaon and then traverse out onto top of shooting star and then down to parking lot. saw about 10 other climber/skiers coming from meadows or across white river from timberline. All had great day.

 

Gear Notes:

Crampons helpfull for teleboots

AT boots fine without crampons

MSR snowshoes will get Boarders to top.

AXE/self arrest poles prudent but not nessisary.

Crevase and avy gear unused and probable overkill.

 

Approach Notes:

You can start at skinning from meadows parking lot and ski back to it.

Edited May 19, 2006 by Davy_D

[snoboy]

Excellent, very timely beta... hoping to make a trip to that area in the next couple of weeks.

[ptavv]

If you have a meadows season pass you can even jump on the lift at the bottom of Heather for a quick trip back to the parking lot.

 

Stash the pass on your way up ('trollers won't like to see you OB with a pass) though.

[castlecrag]

Nice work!! We were one of the parties on the ridge below ya. We got the Alpine start of an 830 start from the meadows parking lot. We did the car shuttle leaving one car @ white river. The snow on Wy'East and to about 6K was great. Skiing out the white river was...interesting at best. Next time I think Wy'East/Superbowl would be the best link up. All in all a gret day though! No crampons/ice axe needed, but lacking beers @ the car

[jport]

Davy D, you may need to reconsider your use of the term "summit". Skiing the Wy'East face from the top of Mt. Hood is very different than hiking up, stopping mid-slope, then getting in a few turns. If you did, in fact, ski Wy'East... bravo! There was a lot of exposed rock near the summit that day (I would know because we were forced to bail 500' below the summit because of dicey rock/rime/snow conditions) With no trace of ski tracks at the top of Steel Cliffs, I doubt your claim: "hit summit at 12:00".

The word "summit" should be reserved for the top, apex, or pinnacle of a route.

[Davy_D]

Sorry to offend the purests. I should have said the highest point on East Crater Rim were if you continued West you would fall off the other side of the rim into the Crater. Actually nowere near the summit of the MOUNTAIN but the TOP of what is commonly called the W'east Face ski route. As for stopping mid-slope or having no trace of tracks on top of the steel cliffs I don't know what to tell you. As you can read from others on this posting there was a lot of us skiing from the crater rim down that day. If you were comming thru the steel cliffs to the summit you must have paased our starting point on East Crater Rim.

[Gaper_Jeffy]

This thread needs some porn. This is from the Wyeast on 5/14, a day after your trip.

 

Porn:

 

 

Nap time:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skied out all the way to HRM. Fun day.

[ken4ord]

Looked like perfect conditions, damn I miss playing on snow!!!!!