Shasta/Trinity chutes. June pow!! 6-6-12

Yesterday was all time on Shasta. I drove up from Reno with rughty (Ken). The mountain received well over a foot up high. Everything down low was perfectly smoothed out. Bunny flat is about a 20 minute walk to skinable snow. Storm came in from the SW but finished with strong north winds. Avy gulch had the best skinning conditions I’ve seen or could have imagined. Like a smooth sidewalk down low and perfect dense pow up high. Easy skinning all the way to thumb rock! Winds were nuking the whole day though and at times you’d almost get knocked off your feet. High wind chills even with the strong June sun. Trinity/Red banks had fantastic dense, winter pow. The line off the top of Misery hill down into Kowokiton looked all time too. It would have been a perfect day to hit that! 3k feet of perfect pow to upper Mud Cr. The winds slowly died down as we got higher and they finally almost came to an end the moment we were strapping in. It was like someone turn a switch off. As soon as we dropped there wasn’t a breath in the trinities and you could feel the sun starting to do it’s thing. Any later and the snow would have been affected. We only saw 7 skiers. 5 hit left of heart and 2 through the red banks. We had trinities to ourselves!

I wish I had taken some pics of the wind coming off Trinities and Thumb Rock earlier in the morning. but it was easier to take pictures with the wind looking down lol. My hands would instantly freeze when I took my glove off. It was probably a sustained 40-60mph north wind up high in the morning with huge snow streamers coming off the top of Trinities loading up upper Avy gulch with fresh snow. Luckily the snow was stable even in wind loaded areas.

I had lowered my expectations driving up until we saw this!:

Ken topping out hill before Helen Lake. The wind was nuuuking in this picture:

The skin track and boot tracks lasted about 5 minutes before they disappeared:

I used my split crampons up higher although you didn’t really need them. It was perfect snow for them though. You couldn’t notice any drag but you could feel the extra bite to make the skin super enjoyable:

Middle Trinity chute. The skiers left one looked perfect too. The right one (the one that’s dropped the most) had lots of exposed chicken heads. Perfect fast windbuffed all the way to just above Helen Lake. I made the fastest turns I’ve ever made on Shasta!

Getting ready in the cold wind:

Ken coming into the main gut of the chute. (he only dropped with his axe cuz he forgot to put it away and you had to scootch over some steep frozen chickenheads to get in anyway) He was on my Winterstick ST I’ve neglected to ride this year. He loved it!