White Friday in Lassen — November 24-27, 2016
After successfully finishing the previous ski season with a spring pow day and summiting at Shasta, David and I have been waiting patiently to get back in the snow. With the upcoming four day Thanksgiving Weekend, we knew it was the perfect chance to acquaint ourselves with the California backcountry ski terrain.
After finding some others with a similar goal, we setup a planning meeting to discuss detail. The goal being to plan a trip Shasta. For this meeting, we had our potential ski mates for the weekend, Tom and Boris, over.
During this meeting, we quickly discovered that going to Shasta was not realistic. The first winter storm of the season was predicted to hit.
We instead decided to try our luck heading to Lassen Volcanic National Park. We found some great resources on the NPS website.
David and I drove up up to Lassen on Thursday night. As Planned, we slept in the back of our Forester.
The next morning, we were greeted by our ski mates for the weekend. We stopped by the beautiful, and warm, visitor center to get the current conditions and chat about our plan for the day.
With high hopes of getting some turns, we started up the mountain. It was a low visibility day so we spent a lot of time getting oriented. We got two runs in, before getting back to the parking lot right before dark.
The next day started out with clear skies but we knew it was a matter of hours before the storm hit. While setting up for our ascent, the storm quickly rolled in. This hindered our visibility and brought heavy snow.
We were able to find some steep tree skiing off the opposite side of the ridge we skied the previous day. After a bit of navigation, we were able to find our way through the gullies at the bottom of the run back to the snow covered highway through the park. This took us on a gentle grade back to the visitor center.
Once arriving back at the visitor center for lunch, we decided to wait out the storm and reap the 10" of power promised for the next day. The National Park Service staff was welcoming. We watched the informational video about the Lassen volcanos, and toured the interpretive section to learn about the history and geomorphology of the area. After we finished warming up, we ate dinner and were able to get a great sleep to prepare for the snow brought by the storm.
The next morning, we woke to a bit more snow than we expected. There was 18" of fresh snow in the parking lot!
We met a fellow car camper, Nate, who shared his breakfast with us because his friends had yet to show up, after the previous nights storm.
David and I were looking for a more intense day than the rest of our group, so we split in to two parties. Our plan for the day was to head up to peak peak 8662, named for it’s height, and assess the surrounding terrain to find some safe lines to ski.
We made our way up to the same ridge as the previous day, and caught up to the party that was breaking trail. We stopped to talk about the snow conditions, before continuing to the top of peak 8662 and leaving the other party behind to get first track down their chosen line.
After taking in the views from peak 8662, we decided that the lines from the peak were too exposed for today’s conditions. We had a great vantage point and found safer line that we could access by descending our up-track.
Even though there were a few parties up after noon, we were able to ski two runs down beautiful, untracked powder.
Navigating our way out of the drainage on a clear day was much easier; allowing us to skip skiing out in the bottom of a gully.
With smiles on our faces, we can count this as another successful weekend. We hope to return to Lassen, for more great ski days, and are excited for the future ski adventures California has to offer.
