The Snow Troopers

About 3 miles in, you get some AMAZING views of Rampart Lakes/Rachel Lake and endless ski lines. 🙂

Saturday (9/29/2018), I ran one of my favorite trails, that happens to be located in the front yard of the Snow Troopers home base! This one, I like to call the Gold Creek Circumnavigation, starts out one half of a mile before Laura Lake and finishes apx 21+ miles at the PCT North TH, on Snoqualmie Pass. I have always had great company on this big day and this time my company was my new running partner, Allison, who is newly transplanted from Louisiana. A few weeks ago, we ran the Enchantments’ through hike, so I was excited to see how Allison thought the Gold Creek Circumnavigation stacked up for views and challenging terrain. Unfortunately, I messed up my Gaia tracking, so I am bummed to have not captured the stats. However, I want to say it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 21 miles+ and apx 6K of vert. Either way, it’s a big day for this Snow Trooper and Allison had made the comment that it was harder than the Enchantment through run. We caught some nice Fall colors, along with views of the following lakes; Laura, Lillian, Keechulus, Rampart (5 lakes), Rachel, Lila (2 lakes), Alta tarn, Kachess, Parks (2 lakes), Joe, Lehma, Alaska, Ed, Ridge and Gravel. Great run that gives you a beautiful lake to view on an average of 1 per mile. Winter’s coming and the trail running shoes are about to get stashed ’til June… We hope! 🙂

The music backing this video was sent to us the other day from our friends “Larry and His Flask”, we are super stoked as the tune works perfectly with our Fall run. Please visit this site to purchase the brand spanking new album and be sure to check them out on their upcoming tour,“This Remedy”! Today(10/12/13) is the album’s release date, so get your download ,“HERE”.

Below is a trip around Gold Creek, in less than 5 minutes… Enjoy, and think SNOW!

Dance party at sunset.

This past Wednesday (9/19/18), Jeff Rich rallied our “Run Club” 😉 for a sunset run up Bandera. So, at 5:30 or so we all (Lisa, Jen, Jeff and myself) took off from the Bandera Mountain TH and ran our way to a beer and dance party break. Perfect, evening run that gave us apx 3K of vert and 6.75 miles of pretty decent views.

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Mountain goats… Everywhere, throughout the high zone.

Sunday morning (9/8/18), I was stoked to get a breakfast call from Jeff Rich, who happened to be on Snoqualmie Pass. Jeff, Jen and myself, met up at the Pancake House (which turned out to be a bad idea, for me… Yikes!), and talked about a little exercise in the rain. Gave another friend, Lisa, a call and we all agreed on a run to Olallie Meadows. Per the “Green Trails” map Windy Pass (which is about a half mile past Olallie Meadows) is just under 6 miles and we parked on SR906, out in front of DRU BRU (our final destination as that is a rule of our new “Run Club”- finishing at a pub or brewery). Parking in front of Dru Bru (on SR906) added an additional 1.5 on the RT. Had a blast running in the rain with new “Run Club” (that I’m not supposed to talk about as it is the first rule of “Run Club” 😉 ). Live to Ski Another Day!
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Mountain goats… Everywhere, throughout the high zone.

Last Saturday (9/8/18), the rain was falling here on Snoqualmie Pass, WA, as I’d figured. So, I loaded up the wagon, and rolled East, towards Leavenworth. Met up with Doc, where we had decided to try our luck getting through the Enchantments in a day (as a permit is needed to overnight, and they are quite hard to obtain). We had planned for 12 hours, which we’d found would have been an excellent hiking pace, as we completed the run in 9.5 hours (which gave us apx three 10 minute breaks). Seeing droves of hikers on the 18 mile stretch of trail, I now understand why permits are required for this section of the Cascades. This Snow Lake zone will definitely, give our Snow Lake on Snoqualmie Pass a run for its money, in regards to volume of hikers. If you do this epic trail, do it MID-WEEK.
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Jen Tell walking up to the salted snow.

Friday, 8/31/2018, was my last chance to keep my crazy (at sometimes) streak alive… This past holiday weekend was one of those times I’d wondered what this Snow Trooper was doing, trying to find somewhere to ski. On the last day of the month, it doesn’t matter what the conditions are, rain, sideways snow or shine, you have to “JUST DO IT”! So, on the very last day of August, I was thinking I’d just head up to Rainier and slash the Paradise glacier, but I had a local friend that was heading to Mt. Hood for a combo of skiing and mountain biking. I ended up jumping on board, loaded the wagon and rolled South towards Timberline. Jen Tell and myself arrived just in time to claim a camp spot, rally to the ski area and walk up just below the mid-way station (below the Palmer snow patch, that’s right it’s nothing more than a patch of snow). It is very sad to think if the slope was not heavily salted, it would surly be dirt, by now. Very sad sight! 🙁
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We caught the last 10 minutes of the Sunset, soaked it in then skied the frozen vein of snow back to the Miracle Mile top station.
Below is a short video of linking 191 months of skiing… Bring on the Winter!
 

Ragnar… A super fun, loose running and DRINKING event.

This past weekend was the 2nd annual Ragnar event at Crystal Mountain. Super cool event made up of mostly 8 person relay teams, I’d compare to Softball aka baseball for drinkers :-). It’s a super loose event where most people (myself included) have no idea how long their lap took, but more worried about the fact that hydration happened with beer and in my case DRU BRU. Oh yeah, the hardest part is waking up sometime in the middle of the night to do a leg, I was lucky mine was the green leg (3 miles). The video below is a mash up of my Yellow and Red trail laps. My green lap was ran around 3AM so I left the cam. The Yellow lap was a base area to gondola, and the red lap was from the gondola to the base area. Both were easy trails, but when pushing it for the Ragnar makes it a little bit of work, but fun!
 

Excellent live music performed by Dancehall Days.

Last night was the pre-funk party to kick off the actual Ragnar race on Friday morning (8/24/18). I captured the closing song “Gin and Juice” performed live by Dancehall Days. They sounded excellent and blew me away when they changed it up for the last tune… Snoop!
 

Perfect setting for beginning of a perfect union.

This past Saturday (8/18/18), we had a couple of friends tie the knot. Not much to say, except it was a beautiful ceremony at Gold Creek Pond (where the smoke had cleared out for this special day). After the ceremony, everyone headed up in the the Alpental neighborhood for excellent BBQ and fantastic local music.
 
 

Below are a few clips of the ceremony along with the first dance.

Looking back on the Kendall Katwalk (right).

Some smokey views of my run yesterday to Kendall Katwalk. The Katwalk is apx 5.5 miles from the TH or if you did like me and park on SR906 by Dru Bru and the Aardvark Express it is about 6.5 miles.” The TH is the PCT Northbound from Snoqualmie Pass and the grade is perfect to run most of the way up to the Katwalk. I thought it would be fun to spice in some clips of my homie, Jeff Rich, and myself hitting the skier’s right chute of the Double Barrel Shotgun Chutes (aka the Twins as of a few years ago).
 

Snow Lake overlook… Good place to lunch and turn-around, if the 3.5 is a little far for you.

Here’s a little visual report of one of the most popular trails in the state of Washington, Snow Lake. I didn’t feel the need to give any details on the run/hike this past Sunday (8/5/18), except it is usually busy and is one of the easier destinations at 3.5 miles to the “lake access”. I try to stay upright in whatever I’m doing in the mountains, but crossing one of the talus fields on my way down, I stumbled passing/chatting to a couple heading up, and took a nice deep puncture to the shin. Be careful, carry some medical items at least a small first aid kit and ALWAYS, “Live to Ski Another Day!”