Justin is badass.
April 3-4, 2004
Paul Belitz, Dave Coleman, Amar Andalkar, Justin Ashworth, Jim "Ignorance is Bliss" Jarnagin
Dave and I wanted to go to Cascade Pass. Amar wanted to go to Canada and ski something, but he decided to come along anyway. Justin Ashworth had been on Eldorado a few weeks prior, and we figured he would be an ideal way to minimize pain on the approach, a theory which would prove to be flawed (more on that later). Jim was to be the unfortunate victim of ignorance. A fresh splitboarder, he was planning on going to Baker with Justin for some nice, mellow, enjoyable splitboarding. What he got instead was misery, but not knowing any better, he agreed to join us. I felt like I was herding cats trying to get our schedules together, but after an hour on the phone we agreed that we would all meet at the parking lot at 5:30 or so on Saturday morning. It worked out, Amar picked up Dave and me, Justin drove down from Bellingham, and Jim made it from Seattle without getting lost. We were late due to the need to fill out some form at the ranger station, so we got going from the lot at 7 in the morning.
We found a good creek crossing, and soon were in the woods getting lost. We bombed up the hill, thinking that we would run into the trail at some point. Two hours later we decided that we were wrong. Justin was off in the brush to my right, Jim was right behind me, and Amar and Dave were a bit lower. I decided that we were too far climber's left, and headed right, thinking that we would run into Justin and Dave and Amar would follow. Neither idea was correct. Jim and I stuck together, though, and after thrashing through alder, hopping boulders, and traversing what felt like half of Eldorado, we hit trail. Woohoo! Half an hour of relatively comfortable hiking later, Jim and I found ourselfs beneath the first snowfield, rapidly melting to form a boulder field. By now we had no idea where Justin, Amar, and Dave were, so we rested a bit, tried hiking, decided that skinning would be best for the soft snow, and headed up. I was about five minutes ahead of Jim when I started skinning, so after an hour I waited, expecting to see him shortly. An hour after that, I got worried, so I skied down to check on him. Turns out, the tricky skinning conditions had made things difficult, so after falling into a moat Jim had decided to bootpack/wallow, which took a LOT of effort and was slow. Right behind him were the other three, who had gone up even higher than us, experienced a bunch of sketchy downclimbing and traversing, and finally also hit the trail after losing several hundred feet of elevation.
After the first snow/boulderfield the slope flattened out, so the splitboarders had an easier time skinning. After a few hours we got to a nice flat spot beneath the traverse to the Eldorado Glacier, where we decided to bivy. We dug plush accomodations, melted a bunch of snow, took a few short runs from camp, and had a good time. As evening drew close, though, it became apparent that Jim was worked; he couldn't keep anything down. Not food, not water. Altitude sickness? Overexertion and dehydration? We weren't sure, but he sure was miserable all night. We hit the bivy sacks, planning to get up at first light and ski something. Clouds built, and soon the sky was overcast. I hoped it wouldn't start raining.
The next morning the clouds were burning off, so we geared up. My POS Smartwool socks had gotten soaked the day before, so I put them on my chest to dry overnight. It didn't work, the socks robbed me of body heat the entire night, never dried, and stank like hell. Lesson learned. I defrosted my boots over my stove (so THAT'S why I bought a Whisperlite!), and heated some water. Jim wasn't doing any better, so he decided to stay at the bivy for a while, then board down to the car. The rest of us headed up to the glacier.
The 'icy traverse' wasn't too bad, and soon we were skinning and postholing up the glacier. The crust meant that I didn't want to bootpack, but it was a bit hard for easy skinning. Instead, I opted to hike up a bootpack that had been made by someone coming down in the afternoon. The spacing of steps was less than ideal, but managable. Justin wanted to skin, and Amar was worried about rockfall from cliffs that were next to me, so they all stuck to the glacier proper. After a little while I stumbled onto the plateau beneath Eldo's east ridge, and was shortly joined by Justin. Ten minutes later the others showed up, and we proceeded to conduct a vociferous argument about whether or not to ski Klawatti. I was convinced that we should, but Amar was worried about the south facing slope. In the interest of group harmony and good snow, I conceded and we headed up Eldo.
Roughly an hour later I skinned up to a fin of snow that I couldn't look over, trying to figure out where the famed 'knife edge ridge' was. Well, that fin WAS the ridge, and I was five feet from the summit. Two seconds later I booted up the last few steps to the bit of snow that was stained yellow, a sure indicator of the true summit. Justin arrived, and we took several photos. There was a lack of summit space, so we decided to head down a bit and stay out of Dave and Amar's way. The snow off the summit was nice, windblown powder. The steep face below the summit was a bit heavier. Following Justin, I went for it, and found that my additional fifty pounds did not bode well for the sluffing of the slope. I made two turns, got caught in my sluff, and bit it, not 200 feet from the top. Damn! Twenty minutes later Dave and Amar skied down, and we raced off down the packed powder on the ridge. A few small drifts made for a slightly bouncy ski, but the snow was very nice.
We had a bit of herringboning to get up the slight roll at the top of the glacier, but soon enough we were facing down the slope to the traverse. The snow, unfortunately, wasn't great. Deep slush made turning interesting, my distinct lack of skill kept getting me into compromising situations. Then things got really interesting. Trying to keep up with Justin, I got some speed and lost my balance. I took the biggest ragdoll faceplant in my history of wrecks, and the 'safety' strap on my right ski didn't quite manage to keep my ski attached to me. I sat up cursing the snow and the ski that whacked a testicle, and saw the tail end of my right Mira rapidly taking off down the glacier. Cursing louder didn't seem to slow it down any, strangely enough. Or maybe it did, since after a few hundred feet it started tumbling and the binding dug into the snow, stopping it. Phew! I retrieved my ski and slowly skied down to the others, with a bruised ego. Some slushy sidesteps got us over the traverse, and soon we were back in camp. Jim wasn't there, so he must have headed down.
Several hundred feet of deep, slushy, sluffing, ugly survival skiing later we were looking down at the field that was now more boulders than snow. It wasn't pretty, but we managed to make it down to the trail without falling into any moats or terminally wounding any skis on the omnipresent boulders. An hour of painful walking down the trail brough us back to the cars. We were relieved to see that Jim's car was no longer there, so he made it out fine (later he emailed me; apparently he felt better after we left, and had a decent run down to the trail). El Gitano's Macho Burrito provided fuel for the drive back to Seattle. I was back in my room around 11, tired but dreaming of Klawatti.
