Muir snowfield photos, Oct 21st, Skiing stoke! Options

[Jeff Huber]

For those in the club who don't know this, I have a very serious skiing problem: I have to ski each month of the year regardless of how miserable the condition are or how long I have to hike to get to snow. A week and a half ago we went up to Rainier to get in our October turns. This was my 36th consecutive month of skiing. Most of our summer/fall skiing is done on the various glaciers of Hood, but for variety we also visit Rainier and other volcanoes occasionally.

The most accessible backcountry skiing on Rainier is the Muir snowfield. It is a permanent snowfield like the Palmer snowfield on Mt Hood except much bigger, there are no lifts, and the scenery is much more spectacular. In late summer and early Fall it can be heavily suncupped and rutted, but fortunately some of the precipitation in mid Oct fell as snow and smoothed it out for us. The snowfield itself is casual and can make for a good introductory ski tour.

This is Rainier a bit above Paradise at the end of the day. The snowfield we skied is the horizontal looking strip of snow that extends to the right in the middle of the photo:


It was about a 3 mile hike from Paradise to where the snow started. When we reach the snow, we attach climbing skins to the base of our skis which provides traction to ascend on the snow (we remove these for the descent). Here I am skinning up pointing to the Nisqually Icefall for some reason:


It’s just a few hours to Camp Muir, which is the point at the top of the snowfield. Here’s looking down from Camp Muir with Adams in the background:


And then it’s time to de-skin and ski. Me (note Camp Muir is part of the building in the mid right):



My friend Aaron:





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