Sunday, December 03, 2006

Hyak and nordic trails?

With the swelling in the jaw subsiding, Andrea and I headed up the Snoqualmie Pass for a few laps on Hyak Mountain, which is labeled as a great place to "get to know your gear." Hyak is usually not running its lifts so its a good piste for relatively avalanche safe slopes to do some laps on. And the backside offers some great tree skiing. And in our case, a great opportunity to get lost.
Since I am using new skis and bindings, I was looking forward to getting to know my gear. But this trip should have been labeled, "getting to know your crappy sense of direction."
After a quick skin to the top of the Hyak lift, which has seen better days, Andrea and I quickly decided we needed to abandon our planned trip off the back of Hyak Mountain and head for a glen of untracked snow we could see in the far off distance. Way far off in the distance. And unlike in Alaska, there was a forest between us and our destination.

Our search involved spending an hour skiing around in our alpine touring gear on Snoqualmie's nordic skating trails, which actually was quite enjoyable except that we were lost and didn't have our skating skis. Good reference for other days though, wow, there are trails up there that (God forgive me) rival the best Anchorage has in terms of quality but definitely not in length.
We never did end up finding that glen we were looking for but we got to make some great turns on the back and front side of Hyak and the sun was shining. Two days after getting my wisdom teeth pulled, that's about all I needed.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Aaron,

I don't know if you remember me, but we used to ride together back in Seattle. If you can believe it I still have the Olmo, though I'm made it into a fixed gear.
Great Site! So what are you up to these days? Are you actually living in Alaska? That must be amazing...I have only been there once, but really felt it was one of the last frontiers in the US.
So I'm figuring that you're married, congratulations.
Every try to hike around Mt. Rainer again?
Anyways if you ever want to catch up drop me a line.

vbezzerides@gmail.com

See ya

5:43 PM  

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