What is this? Powder Snow?

It’s been a while, maybe a month since we’ve had fresh snowfall. But Mother Nature delivered and about three feet of the good stuff has fallen since Thursday. My buddy Johannes and I figured today would be about as good as any to see it for ourselves.

Avalanche dangers would be considerable, but the tree cover and mild slopes of Roaring Ridge made those risks manageable. We started from Seattle around 7:30am and arrived at Snoqualmie by 9am. We were taking our first lap down Glades of Glory by 11am.

We skinned over to Roaring Ridge via the Nordic Ski track (Gold Creek Road) from Hyak. There are a number of these signs along the Gold Creek road as head towards Mt Catherine. I’ve always been curious about them.

And this not-so-secret entrance to an underground bunker just triggers suspicion. We asked a ski patrol along the road about these sightings and he was happy to tell us that there is a large waste water processing plant nearby. The bunker leads down to a pump. And the signs indicate the area where that pump discharges waste water, more accurately ‘sprays’ waste water. Discharges occur on a weekly basis. He recommended that we avoiding skiing around there on Wednesdays.

We hit our stride on the second lap and absolutely crushed pillows on a less treed route down.

Check out those epic pillows… pop pop pop.

P.S. that morning we had tried parking at Snoqualmie East. But we moved on after realizing the parking there required a Snoqualmie Summit pass that was beyond our humble means. We then stopped by the Hyak Sno-park to see if we were worthy to park there. We weren’t, since Hyak requires a special ‘groomed’ sno-park pass. In the end, we picked up what was left of our dignity and trudged under the overpass to the Gold Creek Sno-park. We might’ve been peasants when it came to parking, but we sure were kings on those slopes.