took the day off for my b-day and headed up to alpental with al & hoen. i was on my splitboard, hoen on snowshoes, and al was ski touring. initial plan was to skin up chair peak in the alpental back country cuz reports from the day before said the snow was still damn good. by the time we got out there chair peak was in the clouds. the sunny forecast for the day was bs so we came up with a new plan and skinned to pinapple pass with the intent of riding back down our ascent route. once we got to the pass we were teased with all the untracked stuff on the denny creek side. we had to make the decision to take the easy way back to the base of alpental or go deeper into the backcountry and hike about 6 miles back to get to the car. up at that elevation there was prob 6 to 9 in of pretty light snow in the good spots. i know 6 to 9 inches of snow probably doesn't sound too impressive, but we've been very snow starved in the pacific NW this year so any pooh is good pooh right now. we studied the map and figured we had enough supplies between the 3 of us that if the sh*t hit the fan we could spend the night (if need be), geared up and dropped in. holy crap! the upper 1/4 of our descent was RAD! clouds even broke a bit as were heading down. below the pow level we got into some pooh that was just as fun to ride. found some mini cliffs to stunt on on the hike out. all in all, we took about 8 hours for one run. traverse out got kinda rough and frustrating, we even got split up for a bit. didn't get back to the car till 6pm. the hike out was LONG. it didn't help that we didn't know exactly where we were going so we played things pretty conservative to avoid cliffs 'n such. we've been debating if it would have been faster to just skin (i.e. hike) back up to where we dropped in.
there was added pressure to get back to the car because i'd scheduled a b-day burrito party in ballard at 7pm. pushed the dinner party back to 8pm and we made it back just in time for a quick shower and dash to the mexican joint. food & margaritas were great, sorry i was so sleepy.
I.O.U: banked slalom photos, hoen b-day photos (from a different burrito joint), random snowmobile and snowboard park pics. snow season has been kinda weak this year but we've been staying positive and having tons of fun.
shout out to cousin dea! keep it real in rochester!! rdrr.
