Pre-Season Hiking at Steven’s Pass

The plan Friday was to hit Baker on Saturday and earn some turns at Steven’s on Sunday (since Steven’s hadn’t opened yet). However, our usual go-to source of ski conditions didn’t have any Steven’s trip reports and early reports from @stevenspass on Twitter weren’t promising.

We had all pretty much given up hope until this morning when I spotted this Tweet:

Had a good day touring @StevensPass and mad props to the p-lot staff who unlocked the truck when the dog locked the key while it wzrunning.

Fortunately JJ, Shawn and Ming were game and rallied fast with only a few false starts, so we hit the road around 10 and rolled into a pretty full parking lot around noon; turns out we weren’t the only ones wanting to play in the snow before the resort opened.

Conditions were actually pretty decent. Probably 18″ of loosely settled base. Here’s JJ’s video and trip report:

There was a pretty big crowd of sledders and jibbers hanging out at the bottom of Big Chief so we opted to head over to the Skyline lift (ed: actually it was Hogsback). Given the intermittently decent track from snowmobiles and cats we decided to boot pack it up the hill. It was difficult at times when we go into small brush and post-holed our way up. Coverage is still fairly thin (18 inches of loosely settled snow in most places) — no rocks, but not enough snow to really take the numerous bushes out of play.

The hike up was about an hour. Even though it was 22’F I should have ditched a layer, I was sweating way too much! I also should have brought my better skis. Turns out there was no rocks.

After a few minute ski down we fired up the grill and watched people in the parking lot getting stuck, driving around with their girlfriends hanging on to their roof racks, and kids setting up their own jibbing rails.

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Here’s a few more photos.

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