[TR] Mt. Rainya - nisqually ice cliff 6/5/2011

[danhelmstadter]

Trip: Mt. Rainya - nisqually ice cliff

 

Date: 6/5/2011

 

Trip Report:

 

With 2 hours of mediocre sleep, I left the paradise lot around 2am, and made good time up to Muir -- Where I ate some food - including some "mint chocolate" which I think was the culprit behind a wave of nausea.. Booting up the Beehive felt slow, and I took a couple hours at the top of it to watch threatening clouds move overhead and to wait and see if the clouds were all show with no bite.

 

Feeling good about the weather, I continued up the ledges noticing that gib chute got skied out by at least a few, steps from previous ascenders made the going easier. I was surprised to see the glacier below the rim to be pretty broken. A band of clouds was headed my way, and had already obscured the crater, so I skied off the SE rim of the crater.

 

view looking west across the crater

 

There were a bunch of other skiers up there -- they looked to be heading towards the finger area. My original plan had been to ski the NIC but since the sun was blocked by clouds, I thought skiing gib chute would be softer since it has a slightly more sw aspect which meant it would have caught more of the latest sun breaks, but I decided to ski tha 'cliff once I got down to it's entrance -- crusty conditions gave way to soft snow with some packed rime/debris ice underneath. The angle was never very steep, but there were a few crevasse crossings that I had to think about, rockfall from the rotten buttress above was also a concern.

 

i don't know why my expression was so goofy, maybe because i was really happy

[JasonG]

Nice work Dan!

 

So this would be the third descent? Interesting that it had not been skied up until this year (at least that is what I think I read on TAY). Are conditions that different from the previous several decades, or now that it has been done it is on people's radar?

[danhelmstadter]

Thanks Jason,

I remmember looking at it last year and thinking about skiing it, although i can't remmember if there was a rock step -- Amar was stoked to tell me about the coverage earlier this winter, and I trust his insight as to historical coverage as well as many other things.

 

I don't care if it has or has not been skied before -- that is not a motivation for me to ski, I like the big and steep, if it happens to be a first - thats cool but beside the point.

 

I think that with recent improvments of AT gear, and more TRs floating around out there - ski mountaineering will continue to grow, and descents that are impressive now will be standard routes in ten or twenty years.