My wife Katie and I started the hike at the Mahogany Flat Campground after overnighting at Wildrose. From there, it’s 7 miles to the Telescope Peak summit via the normal trail. You don’t get a good view of Telescope until about 1.5 miles in, and I was having some knee pain starting out, so I left the skis and boots in the car.

When we rounded the corner with Telescope in the distance, the magnitude of the snow made me regret leaving the skis enough that I sent Katie on to Arcane Meadows to start lunch, and trail-ran back to the car to get the gear. Hiking up 2000 ft to meet her at Arcane Meadows (between Bennett and Rogers Peaks), we had lunch and started the long traverse to the base of Telescope.

After the 2 mile traverse when we started climbing again, she sent me off without her but kept up within a few hundred yards until the trail turned into a class 2 scramble. I continued up, alternating between the sunny side and snowy side, trying to find the trail where I could. What was left of the ridge cornice had turned into 1-2ft deep sun cups which made walking in them very difficult. A week of above-freezing temperatures softening the snow meant that even the bottom of the cups would give way another foot or so. I followed a kind Telemarker’s tracks straight up a snowfield to the top, kicking steps into the 45 degree grade and hoping I didn’t end up a yard sale before I even strapped on the skiis.

Once at the top, I waved hello to the Telescope summit a hundred yards to the south (but only about 10ft higher) and found the Tele’s tracks in the snow. The ride down was fun but difficult. The snow was nice spring corn at the top, but had a tendency to drop out in the shadows lower down. My legs were complete toast from the 10 miles I’d already hiked, so after the first few turns I could only do 1-2 at a time. I also was determined to not ski below the ridge; by this point I was done with up-hiking, so I ended up traversing more than I had to being extra-careful.

The video breaks where I ran the snow out. I could have skiied another 1,000 ft down at this point, but it would have meant hiking back up to the ridge before continuing on the 6 miles back to the car. I opted instead to ski what was left of the cornice. In my hiking (in my alpine downhill boots) and skiing and hiking to deal with the cornice (and the lack of it in some places), I forgot to turn the camera back on. Basically the best skiing was on the 60 degree steep, 10-20 ft tall east face of the cornice; I was thankful that my edges were sharp.

By the time I checked the camera, I was cruising down the easy part, and passed Katie as she snapped a few photos. I asked my legs to put in a good speed check for a better photo op, but they kindly refused. Had I been on A/T skis I could have skated up a little way and then skiied down another half-mile along the ridge, but at this point I was just too tired. I collapsed and waited for Katie to catch up.

It’s been a dream of mine to ski this since the first time I was on Telescope in May 2006, and now it’s finally done. I’m glad I did it, but I probably won’t do it again unless I’m in much better shape. Skiing Rogers peak (10,000ft) from either the Charcoal Kilns or Thorndike Campground would be great fun with the proper A/T gear in the dead of winter when there is good snow coverage.

Thanks to Blake Poe and others that have gone before proving this isn’t the craziest thing in the world to do. Thanks to Katie for being a trooper and carrying my food and extra water, and for the awesome dinner back at Mahogany. And finally, thanks to the 50ish telemarker that kicked my ass up and down Telescope, in Tele boots all the way. I hope I’m in half as good shape as you when I’m your age.

I headed up to Mt. Waterman, my favorite local SoCal mountain, alone early on Sunday morning. To my amazement, the road up the mountain was icy down low, snow packed up high, but open all the way. The plow drivers waved as I drove on through almost alone on the road. When I arrived at 8:45, the parking lot was almost empty but the lifts were already running.

Being the first open day of the season for Mt. Waterman (snow from Heaven, not from Hoses), it was a bit low tide out on the mountain. Waterman has some incredible terrain features (read big rocks to huck), but on this day they were a bit exposed. However, I quickly found that the coverage was more than adequate due to a good foot of solid wet base snow that was subsequently covered by a foot plus of light, fluffy, Colorado Champange. This was SoCal skiing at it’s absolute best.

This was only my second time at Mt. Waterman, so I didn’t know the mountain too well and stayed mostly on-piste. I ran laps down to empty lift lines and only found out later that the road was supposed to be closed but the county had forgotten to send CHP early to block the road. This resulted in less than 200 of us having the powder day of the decade while the rest of SoCal sat in lines on icy and snowpacked roads hoping they had woken up just a few minutes earlier.

Blake, Andy, and I headed up to Mt. Baldy after a week’s worth of storms dropped 5-7ft on the local Southern California ski area. Roads were restricted, lines were long, but we made the best of the day and got in some stellar runs, including skiing the east face of Mt. Harwood after hiking 500ft up from the top of chair 4.

Don’t miss the 4-day old baby elephant! In my wife’s words, “So little and cute.” It’s all relative I guess.

It was a busy spring, and it’s been just as busy a summer. I’ve finally posted some of the promised pictures. I’ve still got about 1300 pictures from France and Germany to go through, I’ll get those up asap. Enjoy.

Rose Bowl Fireworks Show, Pasadena, CA.

Here’s the GPS-track from last weekend’s Death Valley Trip, with altitude shown by color. I actually made it about 200 feet higher than shown in this track; I didn’t have the GPS with me whenI summited Bennett Peak Monday morning.

A weekend in Death Valley, from 282 feet below sea level to almost 10,000 feet above. All of the pictures are now up. I’ll try to add a neat GPS-track map of our whole trip tomorrow.

Katie, Beau, Marcos, and I road tripped it up to Yosemite Valley yesterday, spent the night in Curry Village, and proceded to see every waterfall we could in the valley before we left this afternoon. No spectacular shots, but it was neat to see the valley so wet, as every time I’ve been before the waterfalls were all but dried up. Much to our amusement, the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls was open (it’s closed over the winter because it gets covered in ice and becomes extremely dangerous), so Beau, Marco, and I managed to get ourselves soaked hiking the quick route to the top of the falls. After drying out on top, we opted for the longer route down, via a section of the John Muir Trail (see signage below). It was a quick, but fun trip, and we managed to make it back to Pasadena about 9 this evening, 27 hours after we left.

Next weekend Katie and I are heading to Death Valley to do some camping before it gets too hot, and because we really need to use our new tent. A preview of what we can expect to find can be found here courtesy of Nick, who stopped by DV on his way home from Vegas last weekend.

Katie and I took a Sunday drive north into the high desert to see the annual blooming of the Antelope Valley Poppies. There is a preserve in the southern Antelope Valley, but with the late rains this year there just aren’t any flowers there. However, thanks to a web report, we were able to find some nice fields of poppies nevertheless.