Slot Couloir

I flew back to Seattle March 20th to prepare for our first demo at the Mt. Baker SplitFest.  My flight came in around 7 pm and I went straight to the shop to finish building up my bindings with the production changes coming from input from our beta testers.  We didn't change much, only combining a couple parts to shave more weight and reduce hardware.  True to Kloster form, Tyler and I finished machining and building the bindings around 1:00 am.

We woke up around 6:00 am and threw our gear in the car and picked up Aaron by 6:30.  We were up in the Alpental parking lot around 7:00 am and it was pissing rain.  We almost aborted and went to the Pancake House for breakfast, but decided since we were up we should just go for it. The tour up was interesting because of the low snow pack.  The usual route up past the lower cliff band was pretty exposed and icy. 

 It finally started snowing about 2/3 the way up Mt. Snoqualmie.  We made it to the Slot and it looked good.  We dropped in one by one working from safe point to safe point.

 The snow was a nice wind packed powder with a cream cheesy consistency.   At the choke point of the couloir it was a bit icy from our sluffs ripping through and wiping out all the new snow.

At the bottom of the Slot we had a brief window of sun and then it fogged up and rained on us the rest of the way.  There's nothing like ripping northwest mashed potatoes...

Despite the rain below 4,000 ft or so the tour was great.  We got back to the car and we were completely soaked.