Quick report
Went out to No-Name area on BT on Fri 5/9. That was the hottest day of the week, so figured N-facing was the call. Forecast called for calm winds, but it was suprisingly windy with winds out of the SE, which I think helped keep things from getting too sloppy too early. Checked out the ramp first, it was actually really good and still mostly clean, and not too sloppy yet. Lots of sled highmarking all the way up in the No-Name bowl 🙄. Then went over by the notch going over to the Bend glacier and did a N-facing run which was great, still pretty smooth over there. There was a pretty good sized slide on the NE face, looked to have been triggered possibly by rock/cornice fall, guessing the crown was a foot or two deep, decent sized debris pile. I'm guessing that happened the day before. The huge cornice above the cliffs next to the notch was sagging pretty far back, and had released a couple good-sized chunks (those came down over a week ago, they were there when I was coming back from the N face on 5/1). See pics. On the way back out, snow on solar aspects had gotten REALLY manky as expected. We did an exit run on the far lookers left aspect of Smiley, which faces almost a bit NE and was starting to refreeze, that was actually the best snow of the day. Then a long sticky skin back to the sled. Comparing to pics from last season, coverage is way thinner now than this time last year, like 3-4 weeks ahead. Side note 1: I had issues posting this previously, so posting on Monday 5/12. Hopefully the refresh today will help a bit with spring coverage. But speaking of today's new snow, note that it's a little wet-slidey on top of previous crusts. I went up to Bachy today and just powsurfing around the cone I had a case where just making a turn basically pushed off all the new snow in a mini wet slide over the crust. I could see this happening around in the BC for a bit. (Just refreshed the obs page before posting this and saw an obs from today where it sounds like exactly that happened on Tumalo) Side note 2: In my last obs post I mentioned losing part of my snowmobile ski rack... amazingly I found it! Ironically it was because I crashed the sled into the very same stump on the side of the trail that someone had helpfully left the found part on top of... 🙄