Sharing the view of the Great PNW

[C5 Golfer]

To all you East Coasters that have not seen the Great Mountain called Mt Rainier. Here is a view from the top of Crystal Mountain ski area at about 6500 ft looking at 14,400 ft high Rainier. It is such a great picture I had to share it.

[Gleb]

where is it?

[D-Sub]

GLEB! Youve GOT to be kidding! a)you went to school (Mt Rainier is one of the highest volcanoes) b)you know google, dontcha?

[Gleb]

i guess i'm ignorant as they come. for some reason my google isnt working. My school network is under construction and only the sites that i visited very recently work. its funny how they send us emails that the network is under maintnance to our emails, when we cant check our emails....

school network makes me sick

[D-Sub]

HA! thats a beaurocracy for ya!

so...Mt Rainier is in washington. It's BIG...much bigger than surrounding peaks...totally stands out pretty much anywhere in WA

glad you guys are havin a good season C5. last year was sad.

[thomas_m]

My snow report from Crystal on Thursday that I posted to our local board. Here's the trail map for reference:

Crystal Mountain, WA

01/12/06 Crystal RoXors

Crystal was killer today. Low crowd factor, deep pow, faceshots all damn day.

Meant to go to Baker but I was still tired when I woke up from Wed night's pow-wrestling on Wildside at Snoqualmie West. Just too tired to do the Baker round-trip solo so headed for Crystal instead.

Got to ChinookXP right at nine and headed straight up the RainierXP. There was a layer of high overcast and the sun was just shining through. Lots of clean knee to thigh pow everywhere, headed down Iceberg ridge a ways and dropped in Sunnyside skiers left of the lift and wove through the trees. Ended up bouncing back and forth all morning between the steeper trees on skier's right of RainierXP over to Iceberg Ridge/Exterminator.

'Bout 10:00AM it started snowing, by 10:30 it was dumping and the wind started blowing hard. Vis up top was a little tough but the dumping snow and wind were filling in the tracks very fast so there were freshies to be found every run. My legs were sore when I started from Wed night at West and by lunch they were fuggin' toasted.

Ate my (now squished in my pocket) banana and drank a Powerade then started hitting the sides of the groomed runs where there were knee deep freshies everywhere. Not many were riding the Bull Run - Lower Exterminator runs and over on skiers left the pow was deeeeep. I was on the bigass 178cm so it was surf city baybee.

I said 'last run' to myself for about three top to bottom runs before I fell on my frickin ass getting out of my bindings at the bottom. Decided to call it a day and crawled to the car. I still basically suck at riding steep pow but the dumps we've been getting lately are sure helping.

My ride was covered in about 4" of pow. It was still dumping when I left all the way down to about a mile before you come to Skookum Falls where it turned to frozen rain.

If you can go tomorrow, it'll probably be even better if it stays cool.

T.