[mbravenboer]

This is a fairly straightforward destination but I haven’t seen many conditions reports with snow so I thought maybe this would be helpful. I expected many terrain traps but it wasn’t bad at all. Except for the obvious creeks everything was filled in nicely. It seems that west of the crest it is much worse. The crust above 4500ft is very solid. No snowshoes needed there and even with crampons I often just barely punched into the crust. This may be tricky for steeper exposed slopes. There is a few inches of loose snow on the crust. The conditions are ideal to make a lot more distance than you usually can in winter but I didn’t have much time so I did a more obvious trip. Snowshoes weren’t strictly needed between the pass elevation and 4500ft but I found them useful. A couple of skiers I met were heading to Lundin/Red Mountain and I saw some turns on Red that seemed to be from today. I saw some really old tracks up Cave Ridge, but those could even be from the NWAC report from a few days ago. I only took some iPhone photos, but it was a lovely day out. I was aiming for the East Snoqualmie Mountain point, but I ran out of time and with the mountain entirely in the clouds I decided to turn around at 5500ft.

[zephyr]