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. We still got a few good turns in though, and we’ll get out again soon! We ascended up to about 6800’ (+4000’ from the parking lot) before calling it in high winds and fifty-foot visibility.

Once we were out of the forest the visibility started to deteriorate pretty quickly. We were also monitoring small slab avalanche conditions on wind-loaded slopes, which we were definitely seeing some activity on. There’s a large headwall at the top of Loowit which can be risky in avalanche conditions and we were prepared to turn around below that. We ran into a party of hikers that was very upset that we were out skiing at all. We’re not sure why they thought hiking was so much safer! But in any case, under a solid grey sky with no sign of sunshine we decided to spin around and head back to the car.

One thing that I always underestimate in whiteouts is how the featureless ground consistently makes me nauseous while skiing. It’s a nice reminder of how heavily we weigh visual input over proprioception by default! Paul and I took turns going first to help give the other person a little bit of visual context about the surrounding slope, but even with that I had to pause for a few minutes to recover once we got down below the cloud cover.

The ski out was, as usual, fast and fun until the last 50’ of stomping through the woods!