Mount Adams South Spur

Bruce and I were originally planning to head up to Paradise and climb to Muir for a nice ski/snowboard down.  At the last minute I suggested climbing Adams and riding down and we rushed to pack and drive to the trailhead.  We left Seattle at 10pm and got to the campgrounds at 4am, getting lost a couple times near the trailhead.  The road up had only a little snow at the last couple switchbacks.  We finally got to sleep around 5am and took a 4 hour nap, heading out at 10am.

The snow was intermittent for the first 200-300 vertical feet and was pretty solid with my boots only sinking only an inch or two.  Bruce opted to leave his mountaineering boots and skin up the mountain.  First time he'd attempted to skin up a mountain.  A decision we'd later regret...

Bruce was struggling to skin up.  I thought he'd be beating me, but I was waiting for him.  His skins kept balling up with snow.  When he switch to just the boots, his heavy ski boots were still tiring him out.   After 2000 ft.  I had the idea to give him my snowboarding boots.  After that we were making great time, around 1000 ft./hr.  

Around 9500 ft. the grade steepened and there were patches of blue ice.  We were making slow progress having to avoid sections of ice.  Bruce only had ski crampons, so we decided to keep going without just our boots.  With the all the icy patches we finally decided to call it quits since the sun was starting to reach the horizon.  We topped out at 10,200 ft. strapped on our board/skis and started the decent.  It was a pretty easy ride, mostly a blue square.  The snow was starting to get icy so we had to go slow for the first few thousand feet.  There were lost of wind sculpted snow that made the descent slower.  I hadn't boarded in a couple years, so it took me a while to get back into my rhythm.  

The sunset was incredible with awesome views of both Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helens.  This was my first time snowboard mountaineering. It was pretty magical snowboarding off a volcano at sunset!  Further down the snow softened up and I was able to rip down the mountain.  We got back to our car around 9pm.  9 hours hiking up and 2 hours skiing down.  We ran into two groups trying to summit and ski down the next day.  We finally arrived in Seattle at 3am.  Had a difficult time staying awake after 4 hours of sleep the previous night.  Wish we could have made it to the summit, but I learned a lot on this trip and had a blast snowboarding down.  I just bought a GoPro from my brother, so I was able to shoot some footage of the descent before it got too dark.