It brings a lark to your hand

A great many things are, breakable crust included. I skinned up the hill gloating internally about how well my fat skis were floating in new snow atop a soft supportable crust. Breakable crust is, however, one of humility’s great allies.

Blue sky and sunlight at Snoqualmie? What a pleasant surprise!

I’m not terribly keen on our snowpack at the moment. It’s complicated. Everyone’s reporting twitchy stuff in strange places. Perhaps this weekend’s snow will tuck the funny persistent layers to bed for the next month or so, but I doubt it. We’ll certainly be hearing from them again in April, unless a pineapple express comes through and cleans house. This’ll be a weekend where a bunch of folks discover the full meaning of the word considerable, methinks.

Of March. It’s coming soon. Then begins the long vigil of hoping nobody skis them in the early weeks of Spring, or perhaps going after them anyway. It’s a not-entirely-arbitrary deadline, and apparently it’s more important to me than I’d like. I thought I’d peeled the monkey off my back, but apparently it’s still there. In retrospect, this weekend would’ve been reasonably good to try again, but I wasn’t feeling the pull with the requisite tenacity last week. If the weather continues to do what it’s been doing, perhaps next weekend is the time. Only time will tell.

I don’t understand why getting in there first and in the winter is so important to a part of me, but it is. I’m in good company too. A friend once compared hearing the news that someone else had done the first ascent of a line, a few kilometers away, that he’d identified and coveted with learning that his wife was leaving him. The former turned out to be a joke from a climbing partner; they climbed it together the following week.

Notoriety is a bad reason to climb anything. There’s just something so cool about doing something nobody’s done before. It vexes me to know that a smaller part of me would like to see the words in a TAY subject line and in small print in Beckey. I don’t like the way that compulsion feels. I think the mountains know it. It adds noise to my usual clarity in the mountains; not so much to be dangerous (turning ’round felt right, to the bottom of my soul), just enough to make me feel on edge in an uncomfortable way.

Perhaps haunted really is the term.

I have a thesis to complete.

Tahoma, yesterday at 9 am.

Sahales, no longer residing at Second Ascent.

Beckey says the native word Sahale means “high up”. That’s definitely where these skis want to go. Whether they visit the top of Rainier is something of a different matter, but on a completely corny  day, they’re probably the right ski. 174 cm of lightweight and narrow goodness. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was unwilling to purchase a ski less than 75 mm in the waist. Apparently things have changed. Pretty stiff, long radius sidecut, minimal swing weight…

Notably, the waists’ combined width of 140mm is only 4 mm wider than the shovel of my widest ski…

Finally looked up what kind of tree Falcatta is, as the core is listed as bamboo/falcatta. It’s colloquially called Spanish Oak, one of the red oaks, and it grows in the southeast. I can understand why K2 would wish to avoid the perception that the skis have oak cores, as people might think that they’re dense, hard, and heavy. If it’s even the slightest relation to live oak, the wonderful ship mast material, then I anticipate stiff, springy, and durable behavior.

Edit: Brought ‘em home. Realized that the shovel on the Sahales is narrower than the waist of the Hombres. Laid them all out with boot-centers aligned.

Not way shorter.

Apparently, the internet thinks that sahale means falcon, as, it would seem, does K2. I believe the creature on the tip is a falcon, and there are a few other graphics on the ski to support the claim. To explore the idea, I enlisted the help of a trusty avian friend.

Penguin’s new powder boards.