Last year I spent an amazing day skiing at
Mt Baker. A hardcore hill located in the Pacific North West of the US. The terrain was insane, pillow lines and some of the steepest tree runs I’ve encountered. The mountains surrounding the resort were breathtaking.
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Mt Baker; Steepest, craziest tree lines I’ve ever seen and
Mt Shuksan
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A
fter exploring the resort for a bit I noticed a few people heading out touring and snowshoeing and decided to check out some of the side country. I skinned up a well worn track to some nice terrain. I had found the very popular Bagely Lake and Table Mountain ski tour. While the terrain around Table Mountain was great, 400m vertical at 45-50deg, what I really appreciated about the tour was the access, and the scenery of the approach. The trail head is at the Mt Baker ski resort upper carpark and follows a creek and series of lakes to get to the steep slopes around the lake.
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The start of the trail
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Approaching Table
Mountain, approx 1,700m
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Some of the terrain accessible from the tour
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| Plenty of people (and four legged friends) out
enjoying the mountains |
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You definitely can’t do this in Australia, snowshoe dog walk
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Now I don’t know why, but for some reason the Rock Creek and Mt Wheatley ski tour from Perisher Valley always remind me of that day out touring in the Mt Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Maybe it is because you can put your skins on at the car and head off from Perisher Village or perhaps it is the low angle approach and the building excitement as the skiable terrain draws near.
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Rock Creek trail head
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Sometimes Perisher does a fair impression of some of the
snowier resorts of the world
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Snowy Village 8
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That low angle approach that reminds me so much of the Table Mountain
ski tour
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Off through the village
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Skin track stoke
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Burnt snow gums
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Mt Wheatley stands at close to 1,900m. However, owing to the geological age of our mountain ranges, like many of the hills of Australia it is more of a lump than what you would think of as a mountain. Nonetheless, the south-east face offers nearly a 100m of vertical at 35-40deg and the numerous boulders and sometimes steeper pitches make for some great skiing.
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Getting ready to drop in
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I spent some time lapping the face and enjoying the powder, incredibly dry by Australian standards. The low light, snow flurries and my crappy point and shoot camera made for some challenging photographic conditions.
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| Top turns |
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| Lower section, still scrubby |
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| Even lower section |
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| Mt Wheatley powder |
It was my first powder day of the season and I was pretty stoked.
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First oz pow turns 2012, yew!
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As the day drew to a close, I skied back to Mt Perisher and took a few rides on the chairlift. Surprisingly, for a Sunday in the middle of school holidays, there was still plenty of powder around in-bounds.
What wasn’t so cool was the hectic traffic back down the mountain to Jindabyne. A drive that normally takes me 20min took over an hour. There was all sorts of shenanigans going on; cars stopped in the middle of the road, cars off the road and some getting to know each other very closely.
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Hectic traffic
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Not sure how these guys ended up facing the wrong way off
the side
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Not to worry, it was a great way to spend an otherwise very lazy Sunday, skiing powder and reminiscing those big mountains on the other side of the world.
