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04-08-2014, 12:15 PM #26Registered User
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April 8
That shallow snow should melt out soon.
http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/earth/
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04-08-2014, 02:36 PM #27Registered User
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Planning on a Shasta trip next weekend (18th-20th) if the weather is good. Tried the brewer creek route last year over memorial day and much preferred it to Avalanche gulch. Even though we got turned around by low visibility around 12k it was great to be able to skin so high up on the mountain. Would be awesome to get up there in April even if there's some extra climbing through the woods necessary. Hopefully all that snow below 6k should melt in the next week or two given that temps at 6500 are forecast to be in the 60's for the next week.
Lassen from the devastated area should be pretty good right now - there is patchy snow on the northwest entrance cam which probably means you'd find continuous snow within a short walk into the woods from the parking area.
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04-10-2014, 03:52 PM #28
Heading up tomorrow for an Avy gulch lap on Saturday. Will post an update on return-
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04-10-2014, 11:15 PM #29Ginger
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04-11-2014, 03:19 PM #30Registered User
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Based on the latest snow depth estimates, I'd say the Brewer Creek route looks doable now, but the climbing advisory and FS road status disagree with each other.
Climbing advisory:
Currently (as of 4-10-14), vehicles can make it .6 miles past the 19 road, which leaves about 16 road miles to the trailhead.
the access road is open to within 6.5 road miles of the trailhead / about 2 miles cross country to the base of the Hotlum-Bolam route.
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04-12-2014, 12:23 PM #31
Went to Lassen yesterday. Camped at devastated parking area. There is snow to the parking area, but it will be very thin in the next week or so. We did get back to the car without taking skis off.
On the way up, we walked up the closed part of the road for 5 minutes and went "up". We skinned 4/5ths of the way up and booted up the rest. Looks like there were 2 boot packs set. One straight up the gut, and one hikers left to sub peak. If I had the energy, I would have skied off the top about 1500-2000 vert and then traversed way skiers right to other boot pack. You could then hike about 800ft to the sub peak section and choose the best snow.
Snow was mix of winter chalk, perfect corn and heavy corn pow (we were late). Highly entertaining, and not really that hard compared to Shasta
Don't be a pussy and go tomorrow
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04-18-2014, 12:05 PM #32Registered User
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Gonna head up to Shasta tonight and go for the summit on Sunday with two buddies. We're planning on heading to Brewer Creek unless we get some local beta advising otherwise.
Will report back with conditions!
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04-21-2014, 11:56 AM #33Registered User
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North side of Lassen was as good as it gets on Easter Sunday. Bottom is melting out quickly, already up to a 20-30 minute hike from the Devastated parking lot. There was free park entry for the 4/20 holiday weekend as well...
Peered over the south side, road is clear just about to the Lassen Peak Trailhead...
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04-22-2014, 11:18 AM #34Registered User
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So here's my mini-TR of our Brewer Creek expedition this past weekend. The basic beta is that we had to park quite low on the road, and there was a lot of bushwhacking to get to skinnable snow. Good climbing conditions on the route but skiing above 11k was awful since it just wasn't getting soft and most of the snow was very wind-effected. Would give it another week or two and wait for some warmer temps. Saw only one other group the entire time on the route.
We drove up from the bay on Friday night, decided to camp near Bunny Flat to sleep at 6800.
The next day we had breakfast and rented some gear in town, then drove out to the TH. Unfortunately the official road status report was quite accurate, we could only drive about 0.6mi on the Brewer Creek road before we hit a long section with about a foot of snow on it. We ended up parking on a side road just down from the blockage, right next to brewer creek. The elevation of the car was only 5800ft! Left the car by noon. Here's a map of where we had to park and our approach route.
We walked up Brewer creek for awhile until it got too narrow/rocky, and then walked up the S side of the creek figuring it was an N facing slope that would get snowy soon.
About and hour of bushwhacking along the creek until we hit continuous snow and switched to boots and skins. It's possible that we picked a bad place to go up and there was more snow lower somewhere else, not sure. The creek itself had snow but that low it's a deep ravine choked with boulders and deadfall. Eventually the mountain and the route came into view.
It's amazing how the treeline on Shasta is so sudden - seems like it goes from dense woods to open meadows in a matter of feet. We were aiming for the rocky ridge around 9800 to camp. Got up there around 6PM and found some great rock-walled camp sites, as well as some nice clean snow for melting. The wind really came up around sunset and blew all night.
Woke up at 5AM which in retrospect was too late. We were skinning up by 6AM and the sun was already up and the wind had died down. Snow on the main H-W snowfield was very wind-hammered and inconsistent. Large wind ridges everywhere with unexpected pockets of winter snow and not very smooth at all.
We made good progress up to around 12k where we crossed through a rocky patch over to the Wintun glacier. There is still a snowy patch through this. I was skinning with ski crampons up until the crossover at which point I switched to boot crampons for the rest of the route. Fatigue set in at this point and we were moving much slower. The snow in the main chute was a mix of icy, refrozen wind-textured, wind-hammered wintered snow, and pockets of powder. We stuck to the right side of the chute and made slow progress zig-zagging up it. At this point we realized that it was getting late but my buddies had never been to the summit so they really wanted to go for it.
Eventually we could see people on the summit waving at us which was a huge mental boost. My buddies were completely gassed when we made the summit at 2PM. Nobody left on top when we made it but still some people coming up from avy gulch.
No pics of skiing because it sucked and I needed my phone battery to help us get back to the car. Some of the worst skiing I've ever done in my life and a lot of survival turns. The part right off the summit was totally wind-packed but edgeable, but below that there was a long section of horrendous refrozen wind-scalloped snow. I'm not sure if this stuff ever got soft that day - definitely needs warmed temps and lower sun angles to corn up. When we got back onto the H-W snowfield things were better and we finally found corn around 11k.
Packed up camp and skied some fun low-angle corn following our skin track back to where we had started skinning. Finding the car was easier than expected since we just followed Brewer Creek down, but the downhill bushwhacking with big overnight packs was not fun. Got back to the car around 7PM and got ready for a long drive home.
We had a blast being alone on the mountain and my friends were stoked about making the summit, but the route definitely needs a bit more time for the road to melt out and the snow to corn up on the steeper higher sections. Maybe the precip coming this weekend will help smooth things up out there if it's not too windy.
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04-22-2014, 02:04 PM #35
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04-23-2014, 04:42 PM #36Registered User
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04-23-2014, 08:54 PM #37
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04-23-2014, 09:09 PM #38
Quality effort and good beta Arcsim.
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04-28-2014, 10:18 PM #39
back to the top
valley high's in the 90's this week and freezing levels up to 10.5
any conditions reports appreciated
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05-03-2014, 12:08 PM #40
The crowds were huge for the weekend so I'm sure there will be plenty of updates. A mate and I went up the West Face on Friday. Beautiful conditions until about 1 PM when we reached the summit ridge. I don't know if that front boundary reached NorCal sooner than predicted or if it was just local weather for the volcano, but it was intense. At least 60 mph gusts all over the top of the mountain coming from every direction and swirling around ridge. Winds seemed to keep the top 2k from any transition nearing corn. There was a nice belt in the middle and of course slush at the bottom where there was no sign of the weather going on up high other than the plume coming off the ridge line. Still continuous snow down to Bunny Flats, but without a refresh I doubt it will be there long.
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05-03-2014, 09:27 PM #41
Just got back from a Northgate mission. Heinous winds turned us around about 600 feet from the summit as we tried to ascend a west facing, icy, rocky couloir. Rime, ice and rocks started raining down on us so we turned away from the summit and got a nice windboard to corn descent. Fun turns but not much snow down low. 3 mile dirt bootpack from the car till we put on skins.
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05-03-2014, 11:56 PM #42
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05-08-2014, 03:04 PM #43
anyone been up recently?
Aggressive in my own mind
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05-09-2014, 12:18 AM #44
I'm going tomorrow for the weekend, we'll see how the winds are.
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05-09-2014, 09:55 AM #45Registered User
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05-10-2014, 06:08 PM #46
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05-12-2014, 11:01 AM #47
Lassen road pretty much clear all the way through, but closed due to lots of rockfall, some new wind drifts, and also because they want to have a "car free weekend" next weekend (5/17) for bikers and hikers. So, your options are still driving to Devastated and hiking the north face, or walking/biking from the south gate.
Did a bike assist tour up to Ski Heil on Saturday and got blasted by winds and graupel but it eventually blew through. Skied great smooth dust on crust on the SW face of Ski Heil for 3 laps. The winds were mostly North, some North Northeast all day Saturday through the next morning - really strong sustained gusty winds that messed up anything that wasn't perfectly smooth snow to begin with.
Sunday we hit the east bowl and skied the chute skiers left of the main bowl. Missed the corn window and skied firm breakable refreeze around 4:30 PM. (we got to a pretty late start with the bike tour due to heavy winds not dying off until 10 AM)
Top half of the NE bowl was completely windjacked - horrible crust and old railroad tracks. Some snowboarders hit it yesterday and the upper half looked horrible, with the lower half being nice wind deposited pow. The hike out is already looking like a decent effort.
Much less snow on Lassen Peak this last weekend than over Memorial Day weekend 2012 if that gives you a sense of the coverage. Maybe a touch more than where we were at this time last year, but much smoother snow that isn't suncupped like it was by the end of May last year. The summer trail on the main peak is starting to show in a lot of places. Loomis Peak is pretty much bone dry. The south face of Lassen is bony, but the chutes off of the navel are filled in really well. North face of Diller looks really damn good right now. The skiing over Memorial Day in 2 weeks will still be fun - but a lot bonier and a bit more effort than past (even dry) years._______________________________________________
"Strapping myself to a sitski built with 30lb of metal and fibreglass then trying to water ski in it sounds like a stupid idea to me.
I'll be there." ... Andy Campbell
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05-14-2014, 03:52 PM #48Minion
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- May 2014
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- 1
Shasta is in perfect condition right now. We camped at Bunny Flat TH Monday night. 15 minute walk to snow, then 4 small dirt patches before all continuous.
The mountain has been icy/wind blown and it just warmed up this week. Really fun corn snow to slush from 13,500 on down. Summit had <5 mph wind and blaring hot sun (T shirt weather). We rode through chutes on the lookers right side of the Red Banks and it was untouched for about 4,000ft. Go get er done.
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05-14-2014, 08:56 PM #49
Oh yeah, forgot to mention ...
THEY DISMEMBERED THE PENIS!!!!!
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"Strapping myself to a sitski built with 30lb of metal and fibreglass then trying to water ski in it sounds like a stupid idea to me.
I'll be there." ... Andy Campbell
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05-19-2014, 11:26 AM #50
any reports from the weekend?
Aggressive in my own mind
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