Stevens Pass 12/17/2009

After we hit highway 2 the most interesting thing started to happen, for once there was courteous drivers on highway 2... Generally when you run into people going under the speed limit, as soon as you hit a passing zone they finally find the right pedal and try to race you while you are trying to pass... Today nearly everyone turned their flashers on and actually used the turn outs and shoulders to safely allow us to pass! Novel concept, but I've never seen it happen more than once every so many years... We had 4 to 5 cars pull over and allow us to pass!

Sonia came up to the pass with us on this trip, and Stevens had a killer deal on the lessons, lift ticket, and rentals package. It was only $25! So Sonia took some lessons since she hadn't snowboarded for several years and Morgan and I headed to tye mill to play around in all the fresh powder. The Small brothers arrived at the pass and hit some more runs with us. At least until Morgan and I headed down to the base to meet back up with Sonia and get some lunch. I made too many burritos, and was stuffed...

2 videos of 2 tries at the same drop. The drop is adjacent to the PCT off of the Tye Mill chair.




Morgan on Hogsback


Oops, getting up after nose diving off a drop...


Sonia getting help up the hill from Morgan.


We headed up daisy and hit a couple runs with Sonia, and all I can say is wow! It has been forever since I have seen anyone hauling down the hill that fast in between crashes, and getting right back up after the brutal falls. We hit up hogs for a few runs and headed home early to attempt to get Morgan home in time to pick up his daughter. Overall it was an awesome day! Good company, excellent snow, and a fairly safe trip home.

Stevens Pass Burritos

I've mentioned the big tasty burritos for awhile. The are super simple, and extremely filling.

Makes 2 servings, or 1 serving for a hungry hiker (2 large burritos).

Ingredients:
1 cup Taco Seasoned Dehydrated Turkey
~1/3 cup of instant rice
~1/3 cup dehydrated or store bought dried refried beans.
a few Taco Bell hot sauces to flavor to taste
2 Large burrito tortillas

Optional ingredients: (I haven't got around to trying these yet but they should work great)

dehydrated onions, tomatoes, cheese powders...

Directions:
At home:
Take 1 cup of dehydrated turkey and dump it into a 1 quart ziploc freezer bag. Add 1/3 cup of rice and 1/3 cup of dehydrated re-fried beans to the freezer bag.

Cooking:
Add about 2 cups of boiling water to the freezer bag and insulate in a freezer bag cozy or with some type of cloth that you won't have in your tent in bear country. Let the meal stand for 15 to 20 minutes in the cozy and than you can assemble your burritos.

Stevens Pass, Winter Chills and Packed Groomers, December 6, 2009

The day started off with a lot of odds and ends going wrong, like having to hike down 200 plus stairs and a 1/4 mile down the beach just to pound on Morgan's door to get him up. Then we finally got to Sultan and he realized that he left his shell jacket and seasons pass at home... So I was able to get a hold of a buddy in Snohomish and borrow a shell jacket.... The temperatures before wind chill were in the low teens, so a shell jacket with plenty of layers was essential.

We finally arrived after all the fiascos by about 11:30, mind you I arrived at Morgan's house by 6am and it is only a 2.5hour drive to Stevens from there... Luckily conditions were so-so and it wasn't a powder day, otherwise I would of left him cozy at home while I went and rode the powder. The day started in the mid teens with some serious gusts from east to west. I headed to the lodge and picked up a set of Skull Candy ear flaps for my helmet, Morgan grabbed a new pass and we were on the way to the chair lift. The runs were ice to firm packed snow off of the left side of Hogsback. We decided to try the backside first... and what a mistake. They hadn't groomed it in a couple weeks, so it was a solid sheet of ice, and off trail it was a lumpy wind blown ice mixture... When we finally got back to the ridge top, we rode down skid road on tye mill, and surprisingly it was firm, but not a solid sheet of ice. We rode Tye for awhile, than headed to the park to play around for awhile. This is where we were going to take a few videos, but since my camera has "tap control", which I normally turn off, since when you move it keeps turning the camera on... So my battery went dead at the start of recording a video in the park... So there isn't any pictures, but the trip was a success, and the conditions in the park and on trail off of Tye Mill were actually pretty good. When we left without the windchill it was barely 10 degrees now if you add in the 10 to 25 mph winds... It was freaking cold...

Crystal Mountain Opening Day November 11, 2009

After hiking at Stevens on the 8th, I was really craving some lift service runs. So Wednesday was my Veteran's Day anyway, so I needed to celebrate and there was no school. We gathered a group and headed to Crystal Mountain for opening day... We were obviously not the only ones with a similar plan, almost all the lots were full in a few hours.

Morgan and I headed up to the top of the Forest Queen Express and and traversed across to get some powder turns. After we got to the bottom, it was time for some stretching and we waited for van and the group that came up in his car. I received a few rock scraps, but Morgan went for the core on his skis...

Me at the top of Forest Queen.
Morgan at the top of Forest Queen.
Van at the top of Forest Queen.
After Morgan hit a lone rock... If you look careful the rock he hit rolled down the hill and is skiers right of his right pole.
Van trying to sneak some beer.
Morgan and I drinking the pitcher at lunch.
Look at all the ants hiking up...
now if you look careful you can see the top of the other skin/boot track that zig-zags up the mountain. These people are crazy, I would of taken the zig-zag path so that I wouldn't die of physical exhaustion...
Drum roll... the reason why Crystal tracked out with in a couple runs...
Morgan above Green Valley.
The fog in the valley on the way down the mountain.

A couple days later I repaired Morgan's ski base to the best of my ability. There's some ruff spots but without a base grind I wouldn't be able to remove the roughness of the edge of the cuts in his base.

The damage...
Evidence of a dry base that needs a good waxing.
Post repair, prewax.
The same spot that was above showing how dry the base was, This is after a One Ball Jay All-Temp Graphite hot wax, buffing, structuring and corking the base, look at that shiny base.
The damaged area post repair and post wax. It's the best that could be done with out a base grind to smooth the damaged area more. The depth of the cut might or might not hold the ptex forever, but we'll see and it was a lot cheaper than a Level 3 base repair.

Stevens Pass, Knee Deep in Pow November 8th, 2009

What a weekend... So I procrastinated some studying for the weekend and got some R&R/Masochistic hiking at Stevens Pass in to calm the soul. I'm all for difficult hikes just to get to anything my soul needs, and the pain in my legs from helping cut the boot pack up Big Chief in 30 inches or so of fresh snow is fairly evident.

The day started out in Lynnwood, and my cousin Zach and I dilly dallied our way out the door at 5:30am and slowly made our way to Stevens Pass. After a lot of stops on the way we finally were working our way up the pass. The roads were bare and wet most of the way, and since I was driving my "new to me" Subaru Forester I drove in the uncleared lane to see how the tires handled while cornering accelerating and braking, since the pass was a ghost town on the way up the mountain I could really test the braking. When we arrived at the parking lot the initial plan was to go to the PCT Trail head and hike the PCT across the resort to Tye mill, but the PCT parking lot had still not been plowed so we played in the snow! More vehicle handling tests, cause you can never be too prepared with the knowledge of knowing how your vehicle will handle in a slide or deeper snow. After having to dig out once... we finally went over to the main parking lot and just hiked the Big Chief run to the PCT... What a workout, even with snowshoes we were sinking past our knees up the nice grade. At about the jct to the PCT, which it was deep enough that if you didn't know where it was, good luck finding it. I decided there was no sense traversing to make a new boot back up Tye when there was already one being started on Big chief. So I continued up the hill in the boot pack and Zach stuck around to take a video of me coming down the mountain.













After taking the video, Zach started down the hill and I hiked back up for another run or 2. After the snowboarding I broke out the old trusty MSR Simmerlite and started melting snow to make the Burrito concoction that I've been working on. I promised awhile ago that I'd write a blog on it eventually, and now I will have to. I herby name them the "Stevens Pass Burritos". After adding the water to the bag with the mix in it, I wrapped the freezer bag in my fleece and stuffed it in my backpack to let it reconstitute. We melted a little more snow, and made some Hot Apple Cider to warm the soul. After making lunch we headed to the car and headed home. What an epic day for being so early in November! Bring on winter, cause my mind and soul needs an immersion into the deep powder of a winter wonderland!

Rivers a muck, Silvers a red, The Cascade River October 24th 2009

So after a good week of not being able to fish during my weekends off of school... I headed up Highway 20 to the Cascade River with my Dad. The river still had decent visibility with a slight tinge, but since it was a fairly rocky base it does not get silted out like the lower Skagit, and the Stilly Rivers were. We fished for several hours and we saw a few silvers swimming in front of us as red as can be... After seeing no one catch anything worth wild for several hours, we moved down stream to try another spot. To no avail, the current was so strong near the outlet... So we checked out the egg hole, and as it was suspected initially it had fishermen lined on both sides of the hole... This is a small feeder river for the Skagit and it is not very wide...

Dad on the cascade early in the morning.

Dad on the river with fog rolling over the surrounding hills.
So we left and headed down the Skagit to try a few more spots and still to no avail. We didn't catch anything more than the sight of a lot of humpy salmon carcasses, Dad caught a caught a spent humpy and we saw some nearly dead humpies barely swimming along. After talking to a few more people the Skagit was blown out from the Sauk River to it's mouth... So we called it a day and headed home. On the way home through Darrington we were treated with a great view the snow dusted peak above Darrington and the views of the mud laden Sauk and Stilly Rivers...

Just south of Marblemount the fall colors were gleaming.
Dad on the Skagit River.
The view coming in through Darrington.

Stilly Salmon Fishing, The Coho That Escaped 10/10/2009

The day started off early with me leaving my house at 4:30am to get all the way north before 6 am. We arrived on the river shortly after 7am as the sun was finishing rising. We were early enough to snag a good spot before the rest of the crowd showed up for the lovely shoulder to shoulder salmon fishing fiasco. In about 4 casts I had a humpy on the line, in another 4 or so casts the fun began. My first coho of the season was hooked, running and jumping like mad! This was the second salmon on my new Uglystick and was proving to be an excellent investment. I fought the fish for a good while, until it was finally tired enough that I could beach the fish on the bank. It was a beautifully silver Coho that was about 14lbs. We strung it up on the stringer to keep the fish alive while fishing for more. It's a general practice that we've been using for years to keep the meat fresh and gut them before we leave. We fished for hours and even though the crowds had thickened it was the only Coho that was caught on the beach. On the side that we were on there was 30+ fisherman, and than on the otherside one asshat decides to start fishing casting towards us. Mind you this is not the Skagit, let alone a wide river. I had been casting nearly all the way across the river all morning. So it was only a matter of time until Murphy's Law kicked in and the asshat caught one of our lines... I was the lucky one to get intertwined with his line... Some choice words were exchanged across the river, until he let his line out and untangled the line. Today was the day of catching things, I caught a Humpy, a Coho, the line across the river, the line to my right and left, a leaf, my hat that ways laying behind me, hell I even reeled in a rock that the hook found a hole in... After hours of fishing dad and I swapped places and I was near the stringer, for some odd reason I looked back to check on the fish, and at that moment I watched the crimp come loose and my fish starting to swim away. Instinctly I jumped after it (waders and all...), I narrowly missed the end of stringer, scooped water down my waiters, and rinsed water over my phone and wallet.... The day of fishing was now over and I was cold and wet... At least I got a picture as I was taking the hook out...

It's a bad picture, the angle makes my hand look huge... But it's the only one I got...


I will now be making a stronger stringer without any Chinese crimps... I'm thinking a metal stringer with a noose and a polypropylene rope extension. But I really don't want to bleed them and have them floating dead in the river to collect all of the contaminants in the belly...