Tumalo Butte

December 29, 2005 After I was done with finals, I spent a week in Seattle getting some work done. I then flew down to Oregon to spend the rest of the holidays with my family. We went to Smith, but my dad and I were anxious for some skiing. It started precipitating, leading to large amounts of snow at higher elevations. Given that December is usually pretty marginal for skiing in Oregon, we headed to the highest sno-park in the Central Oregon Cascades: Tumalo. After leaving home, Dad realized he had forgotten his insulated coat. So we turned around and drove back home. We got going again, and while driving over Willamette Pass we realized that we had screwed up. Santiam Pass would have been the correct choice. Whoops. Oh, well, we continued, and after missing the turnoff to Bachelor, we corrected that mistake and ended up at the Tumalo sno-park at 11am. There was a lot of snow, so we excitedly started skinning up. The snow was layered and somewhat crusty; we reached the summit, poked our heads over to the East Bowl, and took a look. Earlier parties had started the tracking-out process, but the snow was stable. Little wind loading had occurred, and the upper slabs were well bonded. There was a six or eight inch soft slab, then a hard crust, and more soft slab. Three feet down there was very old, pre-drought compacted snow. I dropped in, and figured out how to ski the crust. Small fall-line turns with a decided heel thrust allowed my ski tails to break through reliably, and still avoided the hooking that such snow tends to induce. The skiing was pretty fun; we headed up for another lap before lunch. After lunch we took another two runs. The tracked-out chunks were best handled with big fast turns, but the untracked sections of crust required a lot of finesse at higher speeds. I really enjoyed it. There were two other guys, tele-skiers, but they were more interested in jumping off rocks than skiing the crust successfully, so we harvested several virgin lines without trouble. Back on the summit for the last time, the threatening clouds finally engulfed us, and we started picking our way down the west side in a whiteout. The gentle slopes are fun, no turning is required other than what is necessary to avoid trees. Without the reference afforded by Mt. Bachelor, we ended up going way, way, way too far skier's left. We hit the packed snowmobile trail and started skating in the direction of the sno-park. Soon we put on skins and continued, wondering where on earth we were. After an hour we reached the car, well after sunset, in a raging snowstorm. Driving home was slow. Last ski trip of the year. Not bad, despite the worst snowpack in a century. Let's see what 2006 brings...