5/14/02
Jon and I went through the usual and customary pre-outing negotiations and settled on doing the Wy'East face on Mt. Hood. The Wy'East face looks like a fairly intimidating vertical wall from below. It's pretty intimidating looking down from the top too... it features a significant roll off the top that obscures the route below until you've committed to it. It's a truly aesthetic line.
Jon had never been up there. I'd been high on the face with Matt before but had to abandon due to warm temps and sloppy rotten snow on the upper face - maybe about 600 vertical feet short of the top. There was a bit of weather moving through Sunday and Monday but I was encouraged by clearing skies late Monday evening in Portland. Even if the upper climb wasn't going to happen there's plenty of yo-yoing to do around the (now closed) Mt. Hood Meadows area.
I pulled up behind Jon's truck at the gate at Meadows at a fairly leisurely 6:40. I had actually driven through a couple of snow squalls on the way up & there was perhaps an inch of new snow on the ground at the Meadows lot. After debating the ice-axe carry, we shouldered our loads and started up. Climbing the groomers to the top of Cascade was a breeze - we knocked out the first 2000 vertical feet in about 90 minutes.
| Skinning across the 'snirt' above the Cascade lift. The big wall above & left is the Wy'East face. |
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We noticed the clouds below us becoming more and more puffy as the sun rose higher in the sky. The cloud deck that had topped out at about 5000 feet at the start of the day continued to rise with the heating as the hours passed. It would eventually reach the 9000 foot level by about mid-day.
| Jon trudges up the cat-track that's used to for mid-season access to the top of Super Bowl. |
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As the pitch below the face steepened, the skinning became more and more comical. The snow surface was pretty hard up high and the intensifying sunlight was putting a nice thin water glaze over the top... a good sign for the corn skiing to come, but bad for sticking to the side of a mountain on skins. My skins are a bit more 'seasoned' and grippy than Jon's, and I was able to manage about 500 additional feet in elevation on them. We both made the transition to crampons thereafter.
After passing through 9000 ft the pitch steepens markedly. Jon's climbing-motor had been working an extra gear all morning long, so I was happy to follow in the steps he was kicking. We switched and I took over responsibilities for a bit, but he did the lion's share of the work to the top, for sure. By the time we passed through 10,000 feet the pitch was even steeper, and we were both suffering. The face was being fully impacted by the sun by now, and the fresh snow up high (now amounting to only 3 inches at most) was starting to ball in the crampons. Thankfully it still overlayed a firm base, and we avoided the post-holing experience that Matt and I had up there a year before entirely . The final few hundred vertical feet were fairly brutal, and were made even more dizzying by the wicked perspective of standing on a nearly 40-degree surface with clouds now only about 1500 feet below us. It was an AWESOME climb.
| Jon building the staircase near the top of the face. |
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We finally topped out at 10,500 feet, unloaded the bag of rocks from our shoulders, and did the quick scramble to peer over the edge of the ridge into the crater. An incredible view.
| Dropping off the luggage. |
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Looking across the crater from the top of the face. The true summit is
upper right & the Hogsback (with opening 'schrund bisecting it) leading
to the Pearly Gates from lower left. (Jon Carney photo) |
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| Looking down at Illumination Rock and the Zigzag Glacier from the ridgetop. |
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The temperature of the west wind coming across the top of the ridge was in stark contrast with the sun-baked exposure we'd been on for the last couple of hours. Our fear was that the snow below us was getting out of shape right before our eyes, so we chowed down and prepared for the descent. We felt there might be a bit of sluff-dodging on the way down at this point.
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Lunch with a view. There were a surprising number of vents on this ridgeline . . . one of them is below & left |
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| Standing at the top of the face . . . getting ready to dig in to the day's main dish. |
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So we strapped on the sticks and tentatively stepped off. The fears of a sloppy snowpack proved unfounded. The 3 or so inches of new snow sure looked like powder, sure felt like powder, and sure skiied like powder, too!!! Jon and I traded visual belays and the top 2000 vertical feet of the descent evaporated away entirely too rapidly. What an incredible ski!!
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Jon pulls up after a few hundred vertical feet of skiing to make sure
the skiing is as good as he thinks it is....
It was... |
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| Racing the chunkies on the upper face. |
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| One of hundreds of excellent turns on the upper mountain. |
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Only 4000 more vertical feet back to the car (Jon Carney photo) |
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Hop-turnin' elevator ride back into the cloud deck. (Jon Carney photo) |
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By the time we reached the base of the Wy' East face, the snow was starting to feel a bit more 'spring-like' . . . corny and wet.
| Jon dropping back into the clouds at the base of the face. |
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Rather than descend our route of ascent we dropped into the upper Newton-Clark Glacier, and back into the clouds. A few small crevasses were beginning to make their customary summer appearance but they were easily skirted. The cloud/fog layer was only a minor nuisance - the visibility never dropped below about 300 yards. By the time we reached the top of the SuperBowl above the Heather Canyon we were fully below the deck.
The new snow above Super Bowl had a sort of pasty consistency but it was still a really fun ski. There were a handful of pitches, both short and long, with some really nice hop-turnable steepness. Great skiing.
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Skirting the rocks and managing the deteriorating snow below the Super
Bowl - the cloud deck now high overhead. Main Heather Canyon is directly beyond. |
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We entered into the upper Heather Canyon, skirted below A-Zone, and made a fairly heinous traverse across a field of nasty nieve penitentes.
| Jon traversing below A-Zone. Some big glide cracks beginning to form above. The top of the face where we started making turns semi-obscured behind. |
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After gaining the ridge out of Heather Canyon just above the Shooting Start chairlift we motored the rest of the way down to the base area. By this time the cloud deck had cleared out enough to allow us some window-views of the top of the day's climb . . . nearly a vertical mile above us.
| We were allowed this look back at the whole of the route whilst doing some 12-ounce carbo-loading. About 5 minutes after this, the whole upper mountain was socked-in again. |
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