It might’ve been scratchy, and I might’ve pansied around like a North Carolinian church group student on a green run at Winterplace, but they were turns nonetheless. The upper mountain had been rained on late in the week, forming a 1-2″ thick ice lens. 1-2″ of snow last night softened things up considerably. Even with my late start (10:30 or 11:30, depending on your temporal viewpoint), it was cold enough to drop twinkling weightless ice flurries on my way up.

I booted to just above Pebble Creek, then skinned up to the top of Moon Rocks, where it became apparent that the rest of the route to Muir was barely-textured blue ice. A large congregation of skiers had decided to turn around there, and it seemed rather sensible to join them. It turned out to have been a wise decision – after clicking in, my confidence in my skiing ability suddenly evaporated. Between unwaxed-for-summer bases, unsharp edges, and a fractured brain, it took a little while before I started making sensible turns. I managed to work in five or six good solid kick turns on the sub-twenty degree slope. You gotta do what you gotta do; some of the confident-looking skiers wiped out…..

On to the goodies!

Whoever this guy is, apparently he’s back in the mountains

The Aquatic Arctic Avian was stoked – he’s been brushing up on his Tuxracer or something. Note blue ice behind the blue bird.

It wasn’t all windraked and rimey. Some motivated folks found fine snow on the other side of the skating rink.

When the wind is just right, there are consistently magical clouds at the outlet to Pebble Creek

Hop.

Turn.

What time is it? Erm. Time to go home?

The glacier portion of the extraction went from the rock wall at extreme upper right to the lateral moraine at extreme lower left. Perhaps thirty or more feet of snow has melted since then.

I spent a lot of time looking into the hole for insights. I may have gotten some, we’ll see. Sure is pretty.

Writing a magazine about backcountry skiing in Washington State? Here’s the background to your table of contents.

Evening light.

Moonlight.

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Taken on the walk home a couple of weeks ago:

I wasn’t able to find a way to view the spoiler as anything but functionally backwards.

I found out today that yet another of my close friends has an October birthday. Apparently this was the last straw – I finally hunted down a little data on the distribution of human birthdays. These folks have a minor treasure trove of fun data to play with.

The only data I could find quickly are ostensibly from the United States in 1978. The red are the daily data, the blue are weekly averages. The minima are, indeed, weekends. I found a suggestion that perhaps this is due to ceasarean-sections and induced births taking place primarily on weekdays. This is consistent with the apparent dip for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Kinda neat. I think there might be some edge effects at the beginning and end of the year, but given that the year is important to humans, some of them may be real.

You are, however, probably already subtracting nine months from the plot (or trying not to), trying to figure out the adults were up to…

Here you go…

Blue is again the weekly average. A gestation period of 38 weeks (266 days) was assumed. If you want to figure out precisely what your parents were up to, I’ll let you do the subtraction yourself (I’ve got too much work to do to add it to the upper axis). The standard deviation of births around the due date is 12.8 days, so there’s really no sense in looking at finer scales. The wraparound point of the mod occurs in early April, naturally.

view.

Taking a new and enhanced look at old photos is fun.

Less than a day’s skin from one of the most heavily used trailheads in the Cascades…. this is definitely the year for such things.

Mmm.

Not bad for a guy who hadn’t skied in years – the slope underfoot is perhaps forty degrees.

 BY MONDAY MORNING WE WILL BE LOOKING AT A SNOW LEVEL AROUND 4000 FEET.
 THIS IS MUCH LOWER THAN THE 9000 FEET OR SO WE HAVE BEEN SEEING
 LATELY. ANYWAY MOST OF THE PRECIPITATION IN THE MOUNTAINS WILL BE IN
 THE FORM OF SNOW MONDAY THROUGH ABOUT WEDNESDAY...WITH THE HIGHER
 PASSES DEFINITELY SEEING SNOW.

Oh please, oh please, oh please….

Stayed home and worked on histograms for part of the day in order to sign for a package…

In my experience with people of the same vintage, it was a very good year.

Following an excellent suggestion from another group, I needed to drill some tiny holes today.

Number Eighty – it’s about as small as you can easily get.

Try as he may, Nathan Drake won’t find the real treasures until he can get outside the box.

I got a gift from an internet stranger today – he’d found a free avy book, and I promised I’d find it a good home. More remarkable than the book (which is excellent, on the first skim), was its conveyance.

Yahoo!

It might be Macro Week, and this might not be a macro photograph, nor is it from this week, but I took a quick sojurn through two year old photos.

Best summit bivy ever.