We woke up to rain at the cabin and had our suspicions about the snow conditions up at Crater Lake. As we drove up, the rain turned into snow. As the rain turned into snow, the snow started to howl sideways and we knew we were in for a treat of a day when we got out of the car at the rim and got a rude awakening of gusts of snow flying into our faces.
Hodgie was breaking in his new splittie (Burton splittie that is) and there was no better place to break it in than the snow of Crater Lake. We did not dilly dally too long in getting into tour mode for the approach to The Watchman. The approach would follow the rim for about 3 miles until we hit the hill. The only problem was visibility was very limited (at worst it was about 25 yards and at best it was about 100 yards), so it was going to prove interesting to try to figure out when we were at the base of the Watchman.
The wintery snow wind mix continued as we followed the rim. At times the wind would pelt us in the face with snow...getting sandblasted by snow...or in this case snowblasted. These were not exactly the type of 'face shots' we were hoping for but we trudged along stubbornly as the wind howled even more stubbornly.
We stopped along the way a few times to see how the snow was accumulating due to the wind and we did some quickie tests to see how stable the snow was. The area had received warm spring like weather over the past couple of weeks and this new snow was accumulating quickly on top of that warmed up snowpack.
The wind swirled, it was at our back...it was hammering us sideways....it changed to frontal shots...it was all over the place. There were a couple of spots where we were sidehilling on scoured snow/ice...and other spots where we were breaking trail 3-5 inches deep.
We found our objective of the Watchman and started to ascend. We were not 100% sure as we could not see the hill or the outline to determine whether we were in the right spot. After some ascending we knew we were on the right path and forged to the top. The higher we got towards the top of the hill on the rim, the harder the winds blew. We made it to the lookout tower and took off our equipment and checkout out the windblown/ice popsicle that looked like it was in the shape of a lookout tower. We took a couple pix, imagined where the lake was and pontificated about how amazing the views must be when not in the middle of a blizzard!
We changed into ride mode and headed back down the hill where we got in a few great turns on some good snow and then decided we wanted to boot up (as opposed to skin) a shortie hill that had a great aspect and better snow. As we worked our way up in waste deep snow, we started to realize it was going to be a lot of work for about 3 turns...sometimes 3 turns is worth a lot of work so we continued....
Three turns later we were at the bottom of the hill again and transitioning into skin mode for our 3 mile trek back to the cars. Our return trip was much like the trip to the Watchman...more snow blasting, more blustering winds, although this time there was a little more 'whine' to go with the weather. The wind was blowing so hard that we could not find our tracks from our trip to the Watchman. Fortunately the return was brainless as we just followed the contours of what we thought was the road and rim back to the parking lot.
It was a great day out. Each day in an area gets you more local knowledge about terrain, conditions, snow type, etc...so it will be going into the information locker for future reference...
some pix of the fun:
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