Mt. Baker Area BC Ski Trip Report for January 14, 2007

By Corrina Marote

The punch line of this story has to do with a man who wears all of his gloves on one hand.  More on that later.

First of all, this trip report is not one of those where the participants meet at the trailhead at oh-four-hundred, commence hiking at oh-four-oh-five, reach the summit at twenty-one thirty then arrive back at the trailhead at oh-four-hundred the next morning, after having hiked/climbed/skied 25 or 30 miles with 15-20,000 elevation gain/loss only to arrive at work the same day bleary-eyed and ungroomed.  Even though I like to poke fun, I do have utmost respect and admiration for the authors of those trip reports.

This trip report is a contrast (after all, we are story-tellers here) to that kind of trip report.  This trip begins on an absolutely beautiful, clear, cold morning at the Cook Road park and ride at oh-eight hundred.  Or maybe it was oh-eight fifteen because Jim Lapp had to fix his furnace beforehand.  The first thing Jim says to me when he gets in the truck is “I think our plan for today sucks.”  Well, okay then.  Would you like to tell me how you really feel?  He did have a better idea.  The plan that sucked involved staying in the trees.  When we discussed the plan we weren’t entirely sure about the avalanche conditions on open slopes.  However, we had both skied the previous day and the snow conditions were predicted to get more stable slowly.  The previous day my party and I had dug a pit on a wind-loaded slope to see what we could see.  We saw that the snow wasn’t going anywhere, at least not where we dug the pit.  Jim’s party had had a good ski somewhere around Table Mountain.

We arrived at the Mount Baker Ski Area parking lot at around 10:00 or so.  I had never skied there so Jim lead the way.  Jim wasn’t sure where he wanted to go so we headed out along a ridge in a southerly –ish direction.  After rounding a turn a lovely, sunny, open slope below the saddle between Table and Herman appeared in our view.  A siren song.  The Hallelujah Chorus.  We had to go there even if we had wasted some time skiing up hill.  Who cares?!  That’s what we do!  We skin up and ski down then do it all over again.  The knoll was a little steeper than I’m used to because this is my first season in earnest in the backcountry.  But the snow was good and the slope was wide open so I could traverse pretty much as far as I wanted to and slide down on my edges when I wasn’t comfortable making sinuous turns in the convex sections of the slope.  I skied down to the lake and watched Jim carve very graceful tele turns with Mount Shuksan shining in the background.  Why, oh why did I forget my camera on this trip?

Onward to the beckoning sunny slope.  I followed Jim up the skin track.  All the skiers behind Jim found the slope too slippery so had to stay outside the track.  Huff and puff.  Jim complains that he’s out of shape but he’s ahead of me.  I hack and cough because I’m just getting over a cold.  I’m a phun phlegm phactory so it’s a good thing I’m behind.   We hear an ominous noise on the other slope but can’t see it because we’re in the light and the noise is coming from a shady slope.  The noise sounds sort of avalanche-y but not quite.  It turns out to be a snowboarder carving on ice.  Good information.  We’ll avoid that slope.

We get to the saddle around lunchtime (which for me is anywhere from 10:30 to bedtime) and check out the snow on the other side.  Too crunchy.  We sit in the sun and lunch, dry out our skins.  Enjoy the clear views of both Shuksan and Mount Baker without having to turn our heads at all.  I have a 2-3 course meal while Jim snacks on trail mix.  Then we get to ski down.  The slope is steeper than I’m used to but it’s so open and the snow is fluffy enough that I feel confident that I’ll make it down in one piece even if I fall now and then.  We ski down, one at a time in stages.  I fall now and then.  Jim, who is actually a good skier, falls now and then.  All too soon it is over.  We’re back at the bottom.  What to ski next?

By now it’s mid-afternoon.  The sun is on an adjacent slope that looks fairly skied out but there’s still a nice open, unsullied slope on Mt. Herman’s flank facing the lake.  We followed the skin track up, which zigzagged across the main part of the open slope.  I’m not entirely sure why people put in skin tracks across the slope most of us want to ski but that’s where it was.  The afternoon sun made the track slippery and kick turns more challenging than they needed to be.  We made it at least 2/3 up the slope when some sloughing below individual trees started toward us.  We both stopped and watched for a little bit.  Jim seemed like he wanted to get to the top but I just finished a level 1 avalanche course and am probably more paranoid and/or cowardly than more experienced skiers.  After all, during my class I had the bejeebers scared out of me with statistics, case studies, and personal stories from instructors.  Jim pointed out that the slope we were on was pretty much skied out.  He was probably right that we’d be safe going all the way up but I just wasn’t comfortable.  I also noticed a crack in the snow directly across from where we were having our discussion.  The crack was above the unsullied slope that I had planned to ski.  So I said I’d really like to go down now and I hoped that he was okay with that.  He was.  Because he’s a good ski partner.

We were in a slightly precarious position on a steep slope as we de-skinned and donned downhill clothing.  During this process I noticed that Jim had stopped talking.  Sometimes Jim is talkative.  If he’s not talking on one of those day he must be thinking.  Here we return to where the story began.  I turned around to see what he might be thinking about.  He had a bewildered look on his face and kept looking around as if he were missing something.  Then began the cursing about a missing glove.  In frustration he pulled off the glove on his right hand, only to find that his left glove was on that same hand.

One great thing about Jim is that he can switch from intense frustration to pure mirth in less than a second.  We laughed and laughed and laughed then finally started skiing down.  Someone cleverer than me needs to think of a nickname for Jim, although he doesn’t think so.

Once out of the sun, the temperature seemed to drop at least 30 degrees.  We went from sunny late spring skiing back to deep-freeze, meat locker skiing in 1000 feet or so.  Back in the shadows, down at the lake.  It was time to go since the sunny slopes were all in shadow.  No more siren songs.  No more Hallelujah Chorus.  It was a flat ski out with a short hike back to the parking lot.  We got back to the truck at around 1530.  Just in time to drive out with the rest of the skiers at Mt. Baker.  But traffic wasn’t bad at all.  The line at Graham’s Store in Glacier was horrible but I needed hot chocolate and Kettle tortilla chips to muster up the energy for the drive down river.

We arrived back at the park and ride around 1730 or so.  No need to go to work bleary eyed and ungroomed.  Just go to our respective homes, eat dinner, sleep in our own beds and for me, go skiing again the next day.  Which involved an easy, flat ski.  Except for the bushwhacking through underbrush with skis on my pack and wading across icy streams in my ski boots.  But that’s another story for another time.

This story ends at Cook Road.  We couldn’t think of an appropriate nickname for Jim but we did agree to ski together again some other time.  What better end to a trip than that?  Now, what are your stories?