A Winter Corn Harvest

Everyone knows that the 2025-26 winter has been very disappointing in the PNW. Our snowpack was struggling to begin with, but two weeks of high pressure only made things worse! With more warmth and rain in the forecast, I decided to resist the conditions and find good skiing. Last weekend, we successfully found some corn, but barely enough coverage, on Davis Peak.

This weekend, the forecast was more challenging. We had another week of freeze thaw on south aspects, but freezing levels were lowering to 5-6k ft. So going high was not an option, but low to mid elevation south aspects hardly had any snow! I noticed that the Olympics would be further from the cold air east of the crest, and might offer slightly higher freezing levels. The Olympics have a similarly anemic snowpack – somewhere around 40% of normal, but satellite imagery made it look like Mt. Ellinor had at least some skiable terrain. So I convinced Chris and John to drive around to Ellinor and explore the ski terrain it had to offer.

On our drive in, we could tell that there was at least more snow than Davis Peak, but also a lot of exposed rock! The terrain on Ellinor is rather complex, with lots of cliffs and rocks. There is not much open classic ski terrain.

We were able to drive until just before the middle trailhead, where the road had snow. We strapped skis to our packs and started hiking up the trail. It was a gorgeous morning, with fog sitting over Hood Canal.

The trail was mostly dry until 4400 ft, at the summer and winter trail junction. Here we switched into our ski boots and continued booting up the summer trail. We thought the summer trail would give us a better view of the potential ski terrain. There were still sections of dry trail until 4800 ft, where the snowpack finally became skiable. Additionally, the final southern ridge line was partially melted out.

The Olympics looked remarkably similar to when I did the Washington-Ellinor Traverse – but that was in June! It was a five volcano day – from Baker to Adams.

After a nice break, we decided to test out the corn. The initial east facing slope off the summit was firm, and we had to be careful to not catch a ski in the deep, frozen boot prints. Then we hopped into a steep south facing chute we had spied from the summer route. While maybe slightly undercooked, it was still soft and good skiing! The steepest portion was probably around 40 degrees and the width of two skis, so it was engaging, but not too difficult.

Since the corn felt slightly underripe, we decided to just book right back up and take another lap. This time it was perfect!

We could have lapped the chute all day, since there wasn’t much else to ski on the south side. Instead, we decided to check out the SW aspect, which in theory held over a thousand feet of fall line skiing.

The upper SW face is too barren, with cliffs and trees. So we hiked up to the shoulder around 5700 ft, and started skiing. At points we had to shuffle across bare ground. There was a steeper section in the middle that we had to bypass in some tight trees because of low coverage. If there was a little more snow, this would be a long, quality run.

We hurried back up to the summit one last time. While it was only 2:30, it felt like the sun was setting on this gorgeous January day. We wanted to make sure we got down the chute one more time before it refroze in the shade.

The chute was still in the sun, and the snow was still corn! The wonderful thing about these January days is that the corn can almost never overbake. Much like cloud corn, or other forms of “dark corn”, the “corn under the curve” is much larger than typical spring corn!

We had to do some down booting with inconsistent snow coverage below 4800 ft, but it was relatively simple to get out. Once we put our trail runners back on, we cruised back to the car.

While skiing corn on Ellinor in January was not on my Bingo card this winter, this was still a fun day where we made the most of a rough winter! I think Ellinor is an accessible ski option, at least by Olympic standards, but the ski terrain is less continuous and more complex than typical. Looking at the forecast, who knows when I will ski again, so I’m glad we went for it!

Notes:

• The winter route had discontinuous snow with such a high snow line. Even with more snow, it is a very narrow route that is popular with mountaineers, so it is probably less likely to hold good snow.
• In better conditions, there is some fun north facing terrain!