Lane Peak: The Fly
Trip Date: March 9, 2019
Distance: 5.5 miles
Elevation Gain: 1764 ft
Fees/Permits: America the Beautiful National Parks Pass
GPX: View my Gaia GPS track here
On Thursday evening I had a text exchange that went something like this:
Awesome. I love when plans come together as easily and concisely as that!
Saturday morning at 7am, Robert swung by my apartment and we were on our way to Mount Rainier National Park.
The extent of our research had been weather and avalanche forecasts, looking at the map for the general location of Lane Peak and a photo of what it looked like. Beyond that, it was an easy day trip and we could figure it out as we went along.
We pulled into the parking lot, scoped out our objective and headed down the road. We were only on the road for a very short while before ducking into the trees, heading directly towards Lane Peak. We didn’t see an obvious skin track or boot pack as it had snowed 14 inches in the area during the week.
Look at that fluffy snow!
We meandered through the well-spaced trees for some time, 45 minutes, an hour or so? Before reaching a large clearing at the base of Lane Peak. We discussed potential hazards, comfort level, and started skinning up the apron which was steep but a much easier alternative that day to booting up powder.
Making fresh tracks up the apron.
Behind and gaining on us were a group of 6 mountaineers stomping through our freshly laid skin track (insert lots of disgruntled sighing and some major eye-rolling here). We opted to stop at the split for the Fly and the Zipper to wait for that group to catch up to ask where they were headed. They were headed up the Zipper, so we headed up the Fly to avoid a swath of slower climbers below us.
At the split, we put our skis on our packs and started booting up thigh deep fresh powder. It was slow going, but I was grateful Robert was breaking trail. At one point about 100ft from the top of the couloir, I saw him stop. I caught up to him to try to figure out what he was doing and I realized that the snow in that section went up chest high and he wasn’t able to make significant forward progress in a normal amount of time.
Robert obviously thrilled at the slow going.
At this point, we decided we didn’t want to track out the entire couloir for that last 100ft so we put ripped our skins, put our skis on, and prepared ourselves for a very fun ski descent.
And a fun ski descent it was! Beautifully cold blower pow coming up in waves on every turn…we were whooping and hollering the whole way down. When we got back down to the split minutes later, we looked up to see where the mountaineering group had progressed to…they’d barely made a hundred feet of progress.
Meandering back through the trees.
We continued down the apron back to the clearing where we tromped around with our skins back on (there’s just something about laying fresh tracks on untouched fluffy snow!) before meandering back up through the trees, ripping the skins back off, and taking one last, very satisfying party run down the final slope to the parking lot.