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.
With one solid night’s sleep and a rest day, mostly filled up with Shay working on his last-minute project deadlines for his semester, we packed the car up at 7 PM and got on the road to Adams. To try to catch up a bit on sleep we took turns driving and sleeping, until google maps took us on a poorly chosen detour on route 14 (instead of highway 84) where it was impossible to sleep with all the sharp turns and accelerations. Finally, we got to the campground at 11:40 and got straight into our sleeping bags.
Unlike last time, the road was clear up to the campground at 4500’, but still not to the main trailhead at 5500’. Instead of walking the road to the main trailhead (a 3.5 mile trek!) I picked an alternate ascent option that cuts through the forest north of the lower campground on an old and not-so-well maintained trail and then beelines up through the lower moraines to join the south climb route. At first, this seemed like a terrible idea as we ran into downed tree after downed tree, and we briefly considered turning back to take the road. Fortunately, we stuck it out and within a mile and half of the campground we were moving quiclky on snow and there were no more downed trees slowing us.
The cold air and icy snow made for excellent walking conditions and we blasted through the forest, at one point moving at about 2400’ per hour, which is by far the fastest ascent rate I’ve held on a volcano!
We took a nice break just before the sun peaked over the ridgeline to our right around 7 AM, and then popped out onto the open snowfields near the “lunch counter” to make our way to the base of the Piker’s Peak headwall. At this point we both bonked a little, having pushed a bit too hard on the lower sections and not taken quite enough breaks combined with a really icy katabatic wind that hit us right at sunrise, so we stopped again for a longer break in the sun. We enjoyed the sunrise for 20 minutes here and recovered while letting the snow keep warming up. At this point we were concerned that we were actually moving too fast for corn to form higher up and we actually had to pop our crampons on to deal with how icy the snow was.
Just before popping over onto Piker’s peak and the summit plateau we took another break in the sun, thinking that we would be a lot warmer there than on the upper mountain if the winds were to kick up, which was definitely the right move. We both felt great, although the altitude was starting to kick our butts a little. I had a bit of a headache coming on and Shay stops eating and starts coughing when he gets to altitude. Fortunately we were still moving at a reasonable pace and in any case the slower we went the better, since we were still walking on solid ice!
An hour of agonizing breathe-breathe-step-breathe-breathe-step-breathe-breathe-step-breathe-breathe-step later we popped up onto the summit proper and appreciated the views from Adams for the first time!
Unfortunately every volcano will always have some combination of ‘mashed potatoes’ ‘cream’ ‘corn’ and ‘ice’ snow conditions as you go through the different elevations. We got a solid dose of ice on the top 500’ of the mountain…
Followed by really perfect ideal conditions in the SW chute for about 3000’, and then easy gliding back down to the trail. We did a short section of whiteout navigation as we dropped through the cloud layer. Skis came off about a mile from the trailhead, and after a few annoying sections of blowdown we were back basking in the sun at the trailhead. It took a solid four and a half hours, but we got home just in time to enjoy fantastic homemade baguettes baked by Julien!
