Snow

The Couloir

If you’ve ever driven from Snoqualmie Pass to Seattle, you’ve probably seen it. Counting truckers, families, hikers, skiers, newlyweds, kids driving home for spring break, grandparents, and State Troopers, the people who’ve seen it probably number in the millions. There must be several thousand, just counting the skiers traveling back and forth to the pass. I bet that if someone …

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Requiem for the Raptors

  Matt and I threaded pieces of cord through holes we had drilled in makeshift footbridges and tied the bridges to the backs of a couple of old snowmobiles we had purchased for Baker Mountain Guides. The goal for the day was to drag the bridges up to the trailhead for North Twin Sister and place them over numerous creeks …

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Rendezvous Huts: A Methow Tradition

Ski huts are ubiquitous in Europe. They’re common in Canada. But here in the USA, not so much. The Rendezvous Huts, located in the sublime mountains that rise above Washington’s Methow Valley, are a time-honored exception to the rule. Enoch & Shandra Kraft built the first two huts—on the Methow’s Diamond T Ranch—back in 1980. Today, there are five huts …

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Running with the Big Dogs: My Iditarod Adventure

A lot goes through your mind while lying on the floor of a sushi restaurant in downtown Anchorage. Stuff like, “somebody needs to clean the underside of this table,” and, “why doesn’t anyone ask what I’m doing on the floor?” and, of course, “this is gonna make a great story if I live.” But I digress. Five days prior, I …

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A Winter’s Day at Coleman Pinnacle

The Mt. Baker Highway is unusual. As one of Washington’s few high mountain roads that remains (mostly) open in winter, it provides access to the alpine that otherwise just isn’t feasible in other parts of the North Cascades due to a combination of snowed-in roads and the abbreviated daylight hours of winter. The Highway, officially known as SR-542, is plowed …

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In Just Spring: An Ode to Multi-Sport Season

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot exactly one hundred years ago in the opening stanza of The Waste Land. The famous first line reads like an indictment of the fourth month as Eliot yearns to stave off vernal rebirth and remain in the stillness that precedes spring: April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead …

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Mea Culpa

It was time, I suppose, for a revitalized sense of humility: not meekness or servility, exactly, but more a respectful modesty about abilities, beliefs, understandings. The basics: a late-winter backcountry ski tour with friends in familiar terrain. There were four of us. I was the one with the most backcountry experience, the most local knowledge, the most specific avalanche training, …

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In the Darkest Winter, Finding a Light on the Longest Night

In early December, the sun sets on Mt. Rainier at an abysmal 4:20 p.m. For the winter backcountry adventurer, watching the sun dip below the horizon does not suggest a leisurely postprandial pursuit for lounging around camp sipping from a flask. When sunset comes at the time my deskbound self would be brewing an afternoon pick-me-up to carry me through …

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The Other Mountain: Mt. Shuksan in Winter

Anyone who has driven up the Mount Baker Highway to Heather Meadows knows that Mt. Shuksan is hard to ignore. This spectacular mountain rises over 7,700 vertical feet from the North Fork of the Nooksack River in less than three miles, radical topography even by North Cascades standards.  Icefalls cascade down from her northern flanks and the summit pyramid towers …

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Old Friends and Falling Snow: Winter at White Salmon Creek

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of only one thing and one thing only. – Joseph Wood Krutch   I am old enough to have experienced the profound benefit of long friendships. The arc of a lifetime, when shared with folks who are special to …

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