After a three year hiatus, Daryl and I revived our tradition of Ski-N The New Year™, this time with Daryl’s brother Mike.
(Previous Ski-N The New Year™ trips: Mt. Hood Meadows 2010, Mt. St. Helens 2011, Lost Trail 2012, Mt. St. Helens 2013 and 2014)
We tossed around a lot of ideas for our NYE trip: Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Baker, Steven’s Pass. Unfortunately, the avalanche danger was really high and the snow was really unstable all over the Cascades, so we opted for much tamer terrain: Blewett Pass.
Since Daryl and Mike planned on skipulk-ing gear in, we of course decided to go big with food. I prepped bibimbap (my favorite camping meal) (though admittedly it does take too many steps to really be an efficient camping meal) for dinner and veggies for a morning scramble.
One major upside to moving 19 times is my ability to tetris a lot of things into not a lot of space – all of our food fit into The Boss, including ice packs!
We got to the Sno-Park around 2:30pm and snagged the very last spot in the lot (lots of families sledding and snow mobilers). After spending a record short amount of time at the 4Runner, we got on our skis and started heading up hill.
We skied up the road for about an hour before popping into the woods and finding a campsite on a saddle in the woods. After dropping our stuff at camp, we skinned up to the lower of the two summits for sunset.
When we got back to camp, the guys started collecting firewood (Riley helped) while I stomped down the snow for our tent. After camp was set and the fire started, I got down to [the] business of dranking vodka and making dinner.
The conditions were definitely not ideal for skiing, so we didn’t do any touring in the morning like we had hoped.
After packing up camp and navigating how to get the sleds back down to the road on the icy, crunchy snow we got into our skis and started heading back to the car. We skied the road the whole way down, passing two groups on snow shoes heading up.
As the year turned from 2018 to 2019 I declared my intention for the year: more adventures. There’s a lot of other things I want for the year, but they pretty much all circle back to More Adventures.
Today’s adventure took place on land stolen from the Yakama and Wenatchi.