Eightmile Lake BC Skiing
Matthew skiing across Eightmile Lake
Eric and Matthew
February 18-19, 2018
Matthew flew into town for the long weekend and a chance to do some skiing in the cascades. A big storm was slated to come in, with up to 4ft of snow falling on Saturday alone. We went resort skiing at Stevens Pass Saturday, but the conditions were so windy and snowy that they closed most of the lift by the afternoon, and the road was temporarily closed for avalanche control work.
Matthew outside the snow shelter
We left the resort Saturday night, and after an unfavorable avy forecast was posted we aborted ambitious mountaineering plans and instead decided to do a mellow backcountry skiing trip nearby to eightmile lake.
We slept at the plowed mountaineers creek parking area, and saturday morning started skinning up mountaineers creek road. After a few hours we caught up to and passed two snowshoers, and then were breaking fresh trail. We turned off on an old logging road about 3 miles in, and skinned up through the valley for a few more hours until reaching eightmile lake around 2pm. It started snowing that afternoon, and never really let up all evening.
Skiing through the woods
It was forecast to drop to 0F or colder that night, so we decided to build a big snow shelter to stay warm. I started piling up snow onto a big drift on the edge of the lake as Matthew gathered fire wood. We soon had a big shelter dug out, and spent the rest of the night around the fire.
In the morning we tried to skin up some gentle slopes to a ridge near Cashmere Mountain, but there were too many
rocks poking out so we soon skied back to camp. Surprisingly, two crosscountry skiers wandered into camp, following our broken trail.
With the rest of the morning we skinned across the lake and up the valley for a few hours in the trees until the terrain got steep, then turned around and skied back to camp. After packing up, we had a fun ski back to the car and drove back to Seattle that night.
© 2018, egilbert@alum.mit.edu. All rights reserved.
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