Low Tide Salmon Fishing

Our annual “Juneuary” high pressure dry spell has arrived in the PNW. This year, a strong inversion meant for nice freeze thaw cycles up high. One line that Logan and I have wanted to check out for a while was the south face of Davis Peak in Salmon La Sac. It melts out quickly in the spring, so we felt that a mid winter corn cycle was the proper time for an attempt.

Chris, Logan, and I started from the Salmon La Sac Sno-Park, skinning up the road to Davis Peak. We brought G-skins, which probably didn’t help us much on the mostly uphill approach, but would certainly save us time on the rolling descent at the end of the day. The sled road had barely a few inches of snow left and was littered with rocks – signs of a rough season so far in this area. If we had been able to see Davis Peak through the fog, we might have just bailed for lack of snow. Ignorant, we continued on.

Past the Davis Peak Trailhead, we crossed the lovely bridge and started real skinning through an icy, frozen forest. The skinning was loud, but the ambiance was beautiful. The moss hanging from the trees had formed intricate ice crystals! We took a while to marvel at these delicate formations.

Around 3,000 ft, the trail starts to climb more steeply up the south ridge of Davis. Here, the snowpack basically disappeared. When I hiked Davis a few years ago, I remember noticing how the forest would be skiable on very little snow. While I was correct, we needed more than 0 inches.

Around 3800 ft, we reached the top of the fog, and finally a more consistent snowpack. It felt glorious to emerge into the sun.

The snowpack was not very deep on the ridge, but plenty solid and made for easy travel. It was actually already corning up. In the spring, this would mean we were already too late, but we thought that the risk of “overcooking” was low with the weak January sun.

When we finally got our first view of the main south face of Davis Peak, we were shook. It looked like early summer. Would it even be skiable?!

As we reached the ridge at 5700 ft, we took a break on some dry ground, which was abundant. The view of the vast fog layer was gorgeous, but the lack of snow was not so much. Fortunately, it looked like there was one entrance to the main gully that provided mostly continuous snow.

The upper bowl looked passable, with one thin constriction in the rocks. So we traversed over and started up it. The constriction had challenging booting, with unsupportable snow over rocks, but we wallowed through, finally skinning the rest of the way to the SW summit of Davis. The 360 degree winter views were well worth it!

Davis Peak might have the best position in all the Alpine Lakes Wilderness for viewing the full Alpine Lakes Crest, from Chikamin to Daniel. It was a warm, perfectly windless day, so we took a long break on the summit.

The ski down the upper bowl was pretty mediocre, although the choke involved some interesting side slipping and jumping over rocks. Then we did a short boot back to the ridge above the main south face run. It was nearly 1:30 PM, but the corn was still ripe, just sizzling nicely in the weak January sun.

The line was the definition of “thin but in”. Rocks poked out here and there, but the firm base meant that just a few inches of snow provided lovely skiing and sufficient protection from sharks. The ambiance with the burned trees, craggy cliffs, and infinite fog bank was stunning.

It was so warm that I skied without gloves in a base layer.

We skied all the way down to 4400 ft, where it started to get bushy. From here, we decided to boot out diagonally through the burned forest back to the original ridge we ascended, so we could follow the trail out.

The thin snow was surprisingly supportable as we booted through the burned trees back to the ridge. We put our skis back on around 5,000 ft and enjoyed still primo corn all the way back down to the fog layer. From there, we did a combination of hiking down the trail and survival skiing on frozen crust back to the bridge.

We used normal skins to climb back to the main sled road, then donned G-skins once again for the rolling downhill back to the car. They were extremely efficient! It was this road, three years ago, when we did the Slammin’ Salmon Traverse, that first made us realize the need for such contraptions!

On a low snow year, skiing an open south face on the dry side of the mountains was certainly a questionable decision, but this tour turned out just fine in the end! There were moments where it looked bleak, but there was ultimately just enough snow to make it work, and the views and ski quality were great!

Notes:

• This is a historically bad year for this region. The nearby Sasse Ridge Snotel site is currenlty around 6.5 inches SWE, which is the lowest over the last 30 years for this date. So typically, coverage would probably be a little better for Davis. However, it likely is never that deep because of the southern exposure and burned forest.
• Nighttime temps were hanging out in the 40s at elevation, but we still found a strong refreeze because of the long nights. We never experienced any over ripened corn despite the warm temperatures.