May 31, 2008

Here is a brief overview of my Saturday adventure.

This quote summarizes it precisely:

In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps. (Proverbs 16:9)

Memorable quotes of the weekend:

You must work with the mountains, not against them (Erich)

You know that ski season is over when you have proven that you can no longer ski (Erich)

In summary, we decided to go with option 3, an ascent and ski descent of the Cascadian Couloir on Mt. Stuart.

The Cascadian Couloir is the obvious line on lookers right in this photo, notice how far up the valley floor the snow begins and how thin the snow looks in the couloir. The couloir was skiable but not in a style that either Erich or I were interested in.

So we got comfortable and took a nap in the sun. Too bad it was breezy and a lot colder than this photo would lead you to believe and sleep was virtually unattainable.

We also enjoyed the views while waiting for the snow to soften up a little. Mt. Stuart and the whole Stuart range is really awesome.

The skiing on the way down turned out to be pretty fun, I thought about doing a couple of laps. Too bad this was the last day of May and not the first day of June. It would have been nice to count it as our June ski trip in our run towards an entire year of skiing.

Lap skiing wasn't in the cards because this trip was meant to be a multisport adventure and the perfect granite in Leavenworth was calling like a siren at the edge of the seacliffs.

We ended up back in Seattle at a reasonable 5:00. That sounds early until you consider that we'd been awake since 2:30am.

Mt. Stuart, you have thwarted our plans once but we will be back and we will ski you!