Mt. Bailey, OR, East Side Ski

After our fun and relaxing trip to St. Helens, we had to get some slogging in, so we set our sights on Mt. Bailey. We had climbed to the false summit in early summer a few years back, and skied down the rib, but an icy traverse and no ice axes kept us from gaining the true summit. Bailey it was, and we were hoping to ski the East bowl rather than the low angled rib, to boot. Somehow we managed to forget the several miles of flats that preceeded the nice corn-filled bowls.

After skinning for an hour, we ran into a creek. Half a mile upstream we found the bridge, and continued into the (flat) treed terrain. I was feeling miserable; the combination of a stomach bug and no views to distract me had my motivation drop to rock bottom. Had I been by myself I would have turned around. After never ending miserable flats we started to climb up the rib, and after a while we came out of the trees and could finally see something. The bowl was covered in snowmobile tracks, but the slope just below the summit looked to be smoother. With lots of snow the traverse was no problem, and soon we gained the summit. There were strange treaded tracks all over the summit plateau, but no snowmobile runner tracks, which confused us as to what sort of vehicle had been up here. Then I remembered reading an article on a Bailey sno cat skiing operation. Sure enough, a few minutes after summiting a cat chugged up, let out a few skiers, and headed back down the mountain. Luckily cats are far quieter than snowmobiles, I didn't really mind the intrusion.

I was feeling better after lunch, especially with the prospect of a few thousand feet of corn, so we buckled up, got out the camera, and headed down. The snow was perfect, and even the snowmobile tracks were soft enough to blast through with relatively little effort. We dropped just about all of the elevation gain in 25 minutes, leaving us a loooooooooooong way to slog out. Several flat, sticky, treed, dirty miles we were back at the car, quite tired. Having to skin back to the car sucks. Luckily we had made the summit, so we won't have to go back anytime soon.

The skiing was great fun, nice corn, open slopes, etc, etc.

For astute observers, yes, that is a new fashion replacing the Mountie "Shorts over Polypro" look. I call it: "Polypro". Coming soon to your nearest REI outlet.