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. That worked pretty well, rest stops in Washington (and Oregon) allow you to spend the night in your car, but because of an I-5 closure I got delayed by an hour on the drive. So with a brief four hours of sleep I got up at 5 and finished out the last hour and a half drive to the trailhead. This turned out to be good, in a way, because if I had started at five I would have summitted far too early for the good skiing.

Rather than make videos and photos on the climb up Loowit I had a quiet climb by myself, a little off the main path. I had an instrumental song stuck in my head on the way up so here it is, so you too can have it stuck in your head. Today’s volcano music is 1977, by Adam Young.

About thirty minutes after coming out of the forest I took a break at the last patch of trees I could find with shade. The snow was still solid ice and after drinking from my water bottle I put it down on the ice, forgetting that it was ice. The bottle promptly shot down the streambed I had been climbing. I chased it for about twenty feet, then went up on a little hill hoping to see it stop a few hundred feet down. Instead I saw it shoot out of sight about five hundred feet down, rocketing down the mountain. Fortunately by taking the path less traveled there was basically zero chance of anybody coming up behind me, but I still spent the rest of the morning nervous that I knocked someone off the mountain by shooting a projectile at them.

I topped out a quick four hours after leaving the trailhead and unexpectedly ran into a colleague at the rim. Johannes is also part of scientific computing at the Allen Institute. We chatted for a half hour waiting for the ice to melt a bit and then I took a nearly perfect ski run back down.

That last shot is looking back up at the line of ants stretching to the summit. You can see about 70 people there, so in total there must have been three or four hundred people out on the mountain!

I found my water bottle!

Sadly the warm weather and rain at low altitudes meant the last mile and a half was a hike.