Washington Pass Birthday Tour

Skinning up below Early Winter Spire

Feb 13, 2021

I headed out to Mazama solo Friday night and camped out at the Early Winters Campground staging area. Saturday morning I planned to just snowmobile around scouting out approaches to trailheads. As I was loading up Saturday morning I started talking to Johnny, another skier who’d camped out there, and he invited me to join him skiing. We waited for two of Johnny’s friends to arrive and then headed up around 10am.

Johnny and I each rode solo and Damon and Matt doubled up on another sled. The road was in good shape to the cutthroat turnoff, then it crossed a few slide paths. I had heard stories of the slide paths being tricky to cross, but they were all very mellow and no problem. We soon made it to the hairpin turn before Washington pass and parked on the along with about ten other snowmobiles there. We then skinned up the road toward the pass, passing over one fresh and steep slide that would be pretty tricky to get over in a snowmobile (at least for me).

Parked at the hairpin turn

On the other side we saw two other people snowmobiling back down, and they had no trouble crossing the slide.

At the pass we skinned up to the base of Liberty Bell and got one 1,000ft lap skiing back down. Then we skinned along the road to the Blue Lake trailhead and headed up. Johnny led the way and we ascended up into the basin on the west side of Liberty Bell until we reached a col just south of Early Winter Spire. It looked like a heli skier landing area because there were orange flags in the snow. We reasoned if we’re skiing where the heli skiers ski it must be a fun ski run.

We took turns dropping down the east side down a gully. The powder was deep and the skiing very fun. We reached the bottom just at sunset, right where we’d left the snowmobiles. We were the last ones out and had a fun ride back to the cars in the dark.