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. After this wave that should be sorted out and the second half of May looks like it’s going to be really good spring ski conditions up and down the west coast! I took advantage of the conditions this week to pop out for some quiet weekday skiing on Loowit and Pahto.

I drove out to the trailhead late Tuesday night and sorted my gear before getting to sleep, the trailhead temperatures were a very comfortable 37 degrees and our new sleep setup is excellent, we took the top 2" layer off our mattress (and replaced it with different foam) and now we have a full queen-size foam layer for the car! I still wanted to get some sleep, so I delayed starting a bit later than ideal, but I was still up at 5:00am feeling great, although that minimal sleep did catch up to me later in the week.

You know the deal by now, a crisp ski through the forest for an hour or two and then you pop out into beautiful open snowfields, before starting to climb! The sun hit me a little earlier than I hoped, so I pulled off the regular trail and tried to stay in the trees for longer than normal which worked very well for avoiding the heat.

If you want, you can do a side-by-side comparison of Helens on this trip and from a month ago, it’s pretty amazing how different the mountain looks with and without a fresh layer of snow!

Here’s some mini-crevasses I found formed by a cornice while switching between two sides of a ridgeline to try to get back into the shade. Not sure if crevasse is the correct term if it wasn’t formed by a glacier?

The final headwall ended up being super hot. Could have started at four am! Unfortunately, once I start sweating I also start to get blisters on my ankles, which is a real nightmare to deal with and I didn’t catch them quite early enough on this trip. Either way, I was on the summit by about 10:30.

The ski down! Conditions on southwest aspects was just about perfect, and southeast-facing was a little overcooked. I probably got perfect snow for the top 2000’ before things started getting slushy, but the whole way back down to the forest the snow was just super enjoyable and fun to ski.

Finally made it back to the famous bump track and enjoyed every moment of the thigh-burning high speed racetrack out!

After that, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take full advantage of the weather, so I dried my gear out in the parking lot and started driving towards Pahto (Mt Adams)! Off to the next adventure. On the drive out I went over a small pass that afforded an excellent parking lot view of Loowit, although ironically the views from Adams on the next day were probably even better.