It had been too long since I’d gotten some quality mountain time in, so when the forecast looked decent on Saturday, Kelsey and I decided to get out there no matter how “firm” the snow might be. After doing a bit of research, we decided to do a ski tour back to Wright Mountain, near Gem Lake and Snow Lake at Snoqualmie Pass, aiming to climb the Oyster Couloir on its West Face and then ski down the South Face to Gem Lake.
Leaving the car at 8:30am, the skin track was quite icy up to Source Lake and we made good use of ski crampons to reach the saddle above Snow Lake, but things otherwise got better from there. We made it to the far ridge line above Snow Lake near Wright Mountain in a little over 3 hours and did a quick ski descent and traverse over to the Western flank of the mountain at about 4,600 feet. From here, we put the skis on our backs, put crampons on, and pulled out the tools.
The couloir was never steep enough to need two tools, but it was engaging enough to be fun. After about 500 vertical feet of climbing, we topped out the couloir at a short rocky step that wasn’t terribly steep, but it was pretty exposed below and quite crumbly. We searched around a bit to pick our way through this as gingerly as we could before pulling over the lip and onto the easy slope to the summit about 5 hours into our day.
After lunch on top, the ski down the South Face had actually corned up and we had a lot of fun getting back down to Snow Lake. A quick skin back across and up the saddle brought us to the ice luge part of our day. Everything from here down to Source Lake was an ice sheet and scraping down it sounded like we’d engaged the afterburners. At least it was a quick way out! We were back at the car just over 7 hours after we’d started, enjoying oat sodas in the Alpental parking lot.