Skiing Mt Lassen

We visited the Miller’s with the plan to go out on the houseboat and for me to ski Shasta, but the weather was pretty uncooperative, with thunderstorms in the afternoons. We arrived Thursday (we had planned on going over Wednesday, but Truckee died Wednesday morning) and I was going to ski Lassen Friday but when I got up all groggy at 6 it was still cloudy so I went back to bed. By 8 it was sunny and remained sunny most of the day so I sulked and grumbled, wishing I had skied.

I was not going to repeat my mistake on Saturday and I left the house shortly after six.

Planning on coming back early so we could go out on the houseboat, I didn’t bring lunch. I was hungry the whole time! I reached the summit ridge around 10 and skied a nice run down the south face and then skinned back up and dropped down the NE face, which didn’t seem as steep as I remembered.

I then skinned back up to the East ridge and after some unnecessary rock climbing and scrambling I skinned up the ridge and then skied across the NE face to the Northwest ridge and as the clouds and hail came on I skied over to the summit ridge.

After chatting with a climber in a hail storm I descended the West face on some perfectly smooth corn. As I came out of the clouds I worried that I was way to far north and started a useless and dangerous scramble across and down the slope, knocking rocks lose with almost every step. I had my skis in my pack and although I didn’t recognize the sound at the time, they were buzzing from the static electricity! I eventually made it back to snow and skied down to where I could have skied to in the first place and traversed back to the car.

When I got back to Redding the sun was out and the boys had just gotten out of the pool (and eventually joined me back in it).