Sometimes It Works Out

On Saturday morning, as we were heading out the door packed and fed, ready for a day in the backcountry, we turned on our transceivers to check them and found that mine was not working. Ergh....no backcountry for us. But just a few minutes later, the phone rang and some friends were coming up to lift ski  so we joined them in the beautiful sun at Hyak.

Take 2, Sunday morning, we headed out to try again on the same tour of the Crooked Couloir (and with a borrowed transceiver). But a few days of sun and traffic going up the Phantom made it look like an ice climb, not a skin track. There were a few scramble sections up waterfall ice, which would've been okay if we had brought our crampons and/or ice axes but we had not. And so we turned around, rappelling the few sections we had already come up. Another failed attempt to ski in the backcountry...

Monday morning, the sun had gone away and the visibility was too low for the Crooked, so we headed out to Silver Peak, which we have skied in the spring but only explored in the winter. After a somewhat long tour, we had a great couple of laps on an arm of Silver, even finding fresh soft snow that hadn't melted in the sun of the past few days.

All that anticipation of fresh snow had finally been rewarded with the real thing. On our way out, we stopped at the warming hut for lunch... 

...and the snow began to fall and wouldn't stop for three days. More skiing pics to follow, only in much more snow!