From 2015 to 2018 I flew back and forth about two dozen times from the San Francisco airport to the Seattle airport to visit Allison. On each of those flights I tried to get a right-hand seat on the flight north and a left-hand seat on the flight south, so that I would get to watch the Cascade volcanoes as they passed by my window. It seemed like it would make for such a beautiful trip to drive north and ski as many of the volcanoes as possible, but at the time I didn’t know how to ski (backcountry) and on top of that I had just sold my snowboard.

Thanks to Tom’s timely intervention in 2017 I finally got to experience backcountry and it clicked: all the joy of hiking to the summit without any of the pain of walking back down to the car! Eye opening. I got the backcountry skiing bug and with a lot of practice trips up smaller peaks it feels like now is the moment to try and ski all the volcanoes.

Hope you’ll follow along!