Sometimes the most rewarding lines are the elusive ones right in your back yard. A couple years ago, I had a short piece published in Powder Magazine’s Morpheme essays on the value of those local roadside attractions. It was just after arriving in Seattle, and while it was written with a few Tahoe places in mind, there was one Washington line that definitely came to symbolize the piece. After looking at the North Couloir on McClellan Butte for 5 years, every trip up and down Snoqualmie Pass, the conditions, weather, and group came together to give me a crack at skiing.
Day breaks early on a Friday morning in March over Snoqualmie Pass, Washington. With a redeye Friday night back to Boston for my little sister’s wedding, and our ski trip to Europe only a week away, this was the last chance to get out locally for a really long stretch. Conditions turned out to be perfect… recent snow over the past couple days to low elevations, but with a relatively stable interface between the new and the old layers.
After a couple false starts to the morning – digging out a stranger’s car at the trailhead and mistakenly climbing part of the wrong chute – we traversed our way into the heart of the north couloir. About as relaxing as coming into the barrel of a gun, the chute climbs steeply, with sheer walls on both sides.
We switched to bootpacking as the snow got deeper and the slope got steeper. It was a wallow, and our pace slowed past the original turnaround point to get into the office before 9:00am. It would be a late night working to catch up, but the line was in incredible condition. A few more minutes later, and we topped out at the upper reaches of the open slab, looking down on a powdery heaven below us. Steep, direct, and filled to the brim with light powder, the line was far better than I ever could have imagined. How good? I’ll let Eben’s first turns do the talking…