Mt. Hood

June 12, 2004

Who:  Dale Ramquist, Ron Niemi, Sam and Lori

Satellite route photo:  our climb is in red, our ski descent is in green.

It was actually a very excellent day.  We were down there mainly to ride the lifts and log some vertical.  When we arrived at the parking lot at 6:50am, things looked good enough to go for the top.  After a couple warm-up runs on Palmer, we grabbed our packs and cramponed up to the summit in about an hour and a half...passing literally dozens in the "donkey trail".  Used only crampons and ski poles...  
 
At about 10am we skied the Mazama face/west crater variation and then down next to Illumination Rock before heading skier's left to the top of Palmer.  We found the snow to be a good edgeable crust with no breaking through.  By the last pitch above the Palmer, the snow was softening up nicely!  Palmer loads it's last chair at 1:30, so we had 4 hours to rip the sweet corn.  The snowfield to the far skier's right of the Palmer lift, just outside the boundary line was AMAZING!  The morning's crust had transformed to semi soft butter and I carved semicircles on my Pocket Rockets at blazing speed for the next 4 hours, logging almost 30,000 vertical feet for the day...oh so smooth!

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