A ski traverse in november? It’s a pretty bold idea but with La Nina blessing the cascades with a great start to the season, it started sounding reasonable. After some pow days at baker and in the north cascades, I was stoked to continue getting out. Emily was in between jobs with the forest service and ski patrol, and I had an upcoming fall break so we made plans to get some shredding in during thanksgiving week. And luckily enough, the weather gods blessed us. As my break began, a high pressure window came over the cascades.
After persuading Emily that repeating volcanoes was lame, I convinced her on an stuart range ski traverse. It would ideally link up lil Annapurna, Dtail, Argonaut, and Stuart. Emily was told that the south faces wouldn’t go but we had a stoke. Emily dragged along her friend Silvian and we made plans to drop off a car as close to Esmeralda TH Tuesday morning and set off. I didn’t have a 0 degree bag so I resolved to sew one in time. After a busy weekend, I got out for a quick source lake scouting mission on Monday. I got back at 4pm with all my sleeping bag materials delivered. Needless to say it was a long night and at 1am on Tuesday, I was power-resting for the coming trip.
4am came quickly and I drove over the pass to meet Emily and Silvian where we dropped her car off 6 miles from esmeralda TH. By 08:30, we were walking out of Snow creek. There was a decent amount of snow on the ground but there were still a fair amount of rocks poking through so we kept skis on our backs for an hour. Once we reached the top of the switchbacks, we put skins on and started our journey. Prior, me and Emily had only been as far as the snow-creek wall so from here out it was new terrain to me.
Snow creek was a beautiful endless valley with peaks towering on each side. As we cruised up the valley, the snow depth kept increasing and skiable couloirs caught the eye on each side. Travel was easy with an obvious trail through the woods and a minimal slide alder or bushwack. Benefits of one of the most well traveled trails in the state I guess. The skinning was spiced up every once in a while by random bare spots. By the time we got into the woods, most of the animal tracks had disappeared.
The first lake we hit was Nada Lake, at about 1:30. The lake was all frozen over so we enjoyed our first bits of sunshine as we skinned across it. We joined back along the trail to skin up to lower snow lake, where we finally got our first views of the enchantments at 2:30. Surprisingly, lower snow lake was completely frozen over while the upper snow-lake was snow-free. From here it was only 2.5 miles and 1500’ of gain to lake Vivian so we assumed we’d arrive at camp right at sunset.
Well we didn’t arrive at camp at sunset and it ended up being quite a night. Skinning around upper snow lake was fine- though obviously not as fast as just cutting across the lake. The true challenge came once we started up the forest towards lake Vivian. From here, the summer trail was impossible to follow and we gave into a life of steep, bushwack skinning. Progress was extremely slow and by sunset at 4:30, we were only 500’ up. Given it was still early, we decided to continue on, hoping conditions would improve. Sadly they didn’t. By 6:30, we were 300’ from the lake. We continued but ended up too far right. We found ourselves on top of a steep face so instead of trying to navigate it in the dark, we set up our tent on the knoll between Lake Vivian and Temple Lake at 7:00.
For the trip, we brought along Silvians new MSR Front Range. It was our first time pitching a pyramid tent so the first night was, well... rough. Firstly we made the mistake of not digging the tent below snowline which let tons of wind and snow in. We also didn’t dig in the inside, meaning the edges were unusable since they were too low. And most importantly, we fucked up the side where our heads lied, meaning a lot of snow came in from that side. A lot. The night was rough, with me and emily booting up at 1 am to add snow to cover the edges. After this the wind picked up and though our efforts worked on some sides, the side with our head was still messed up. And thus began the 7 hours of suffering.
We were in and out all night. Whenever I looked up, I felt snow sprinkling onto my face. I conceded to using a jacket hood to cover my head as I slept since my sleeping bag was hoodless. At 7am when I woke up, there was a solid inch or two of snow on my pad around my face and on my hood. We were happy to get going and by 7:45 we were moving, quickly getting down to the lake. From here we skinned across the core zone, strong gusts blasting us. As we neared little annapurna, the wind at the summit was obvious but we decided to just keep going. Skinning up it was efficient until about 100’ below the summit where we decided to transition behind some rocks. A little booting later and we were at the top at 11:15.
From the top, we quickly started our way down to escape the winds. We skied strong windboard but it turned into powder as we neared Isolation lake, arriving at 11:30. From here it was our plan to climb the summer route up dragontail peak, only 1000’ of vertical away. Me and Silvian both believed we could climb through the cornice but with Emily wary, we couldn’t convince her and decided to ski down asgard pass. The snow was beautiful down to the lake and from here we decided to skin up to colchuck col to at least have a look at the south side. 2.5 hours later we were at banshee pass, but the sun was going down.
Deciding that the traverse was out of question, we decided to ski down to the lake and set up a nice camp. We triggered a small wind slab at the top of the colchuck glacier but other than that, the skiing was amazing. This time we digged out a great campsite by the lake and the only issue we faced was the wet sleeping bags from the night before.
The next morning, we chose against another lap of the colchuck glacier and made our way out. Everything was pretty straightforward and we were in leavenworth by 2pm to learn of all the restaurants being closed for thanksgiving. It was a great ski traverse and I hope to come back in spring. Next time I'll start from stuart lake and hopefully be much more successful.
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