Lava Cake Expedition

I didn’t get to ski another volcano in 2024 sadly. So 2025 will have to make up for that! I missed two early weather windows in January and March to get out, but I finally caught an excellent spring weather day right after Passover. Loowit is 5000’ over about 5.5 miles. For this trip, I tried something different and left late Friday evening planning to spend the night at a rest stop on the drive down.

Because of the El Nino this year, there is very little snow at low elevations but still plenty of snow up high. This is going to make for great volcano skiing on the big mountains (easy access!) but it’s making the early volcano season a bit tricky to navigate. Paul and I tried to take advantage of a brief window in the weather to get on some new snow on Loowit, but we got unlucky and the mountain stayed in a whiteout all day.

Back to Adams! The cold front weather predictions improved the tiniest bit and it looked like the summit of Adams might be just below freezing with full sun. Good enough for us to take a shot at repeating the Southwest Chutes in what could be perfect corn conditions! Skiing to the summit of Adams and then down the chutes from the campground is an ascent of 7600’ over 5.5 miles.

The huge steaming crater on Koma Kulshan is flanked by two major peaks and a few minor ones, Grant on the northwest corner is the main summit at 10,871’ while Sherman on the southeast corner is its little sibling at 10,165’. Unlike the main summit, Sherman is a small mud pinnacle with steep slopes on all sides. Getting to Sherman Peak via the Squak Glacier is an ascent of about 7000’ over a little more than 5 miles.

Half a million years old, Pahto is the easternmost of the major Cascade volcanoes and second only to Shasta in total mass of volcanic rock. Pahto has apparently eroded down below the present day height of Loowit more than once in its history, only to be rebuilt again from new eruptions. The present nearly flat summit plateau and false summit are the result of many repeated minor volcanic events. Like Shasta, Pahto has prominent glaciers on its north side but its south side often dries completely in the summer heat.

What’s better than skiing a volcano? Skiing a volcano twice! Loowit is about 5500’ of ascent over about 4 miles. This writeup has a lot more videos than usual because I was out by myself and apparently I wasn’t sufficiently distracted by the pain of walking up hill! Our first summer (spring?) heat wave has arrived and it made for some pretty promising ski conditions, although with the trailheads still mostly snowed out there’s still a lot of extra walking to get to most of the volcanoes.

When I pop over the top of the rim on Loowit I’m always astounded by the sheer amount of rock that was blown out of the mountain during the 1980 explosion, it’s an incredible and impressive place to be standing and a reminder that we should really move to a different state. The standard winter ascent route on Loowit is the “Worm’s Flow” route which rises about 5000’ over 5.5 miles, meandering first through the forest before popping out into the sunshine below the main face of the mountain.

2023! Time to ski some volcanoes! To get back into volcano shape I took a tour up from Paradise with Jess, Julien, and Greg in early January. Keeping our plans mellow given the anticipated blizzard we planned to skin up as far as we could toward Camp Muir (10,188’) from Paradise (~5,500’) and then turn around whenever weather conditions started looking dicey. The gate to drive up to Paradise, the main trailhead on the south side of Rainier doesn’t open until 9:00am, so we had a leisurely departure from Seattle around 6:45 and got our boots on and ready to start walking around 9:30am or so.

Tacoma is the most volcano volcano in the United States. Its huge bulk of glaciers tower over Seattle (and Portland). Tacoma, like Kulshan, creates its own weather systems because of the short distance between the mountain and the warm ocean air and the dramatic change in elevation as that air rises up the mountain sides. Tacoma is one of the rare mountains in the world which has experienced glacial growth in the last century, although that has reversed in the last thirty years.

Kulshan stands out amongst the Cascade volcanoes because of its very short distance to the San Juan islands and then the Pacific ocean. The short distance and the lack of large mountains between the ocean and the peak create consistent deep wet snow, which accumulates on the upper elevations into massive glaciers. Kulshan hosts more glacial ice in its thirteen glaciers than all of the other cascade volcanoes (except Tahoma) combined!