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Chasing the Pow @ Snoqualmie Pass, Washington

July 31, 2024

Stashes and Surprises in Stormy Weather

By Andy Sovick | Cover Photo credit: Scott Schell

Rain, Rain, Go Away

It’s my first time in the Cascade Mountains on skis, and the forecast is for rain. Or more specifically, the forecast was for the morning’s snowfall to turn into rain mid-day. As we skin past Source Lake, the group of locals keeps talking nervously about how the snow may turn into rain any minute. Their anxiety is contagious and I start to look up for any sign of rain too. Unlike these guys, I’m not used to this ritual of watching the thermometer dance around the “zero celsius line” like a roulette ball bouncing around your chosen number.

I’m from the mountains of Colorado and during the winter we have two types of weather: sunny, or snowy. More specifically, I’m from Gunnison, where we have two types of winter temperatures: cold, or really really cold. So, even in the era of climate change, we still don’t look nervously up to a snowstorm for signs of rain.

Thanks to Scott Schell for the awesome photos!

The Snow That Binds

But as we strip skins and debate between the Cache Couloir, Middle Child, or a simple Snow Lake descent, a cold wind picks up and slaps our faces. The snow intensifies and we all look up at each other. Slowly grinning, Matt Schonwald says, “There won’t be any rain today, my friends!” and then he laughs a deep, triumphant laugh. Schonwald and I had become friends a year before this day when our mutual friend Tom Murphy, co-founder of AIARE, introduced us. I was launching a publishing company based on my ski atlas for the Crested Butte zone and Matt was looking for a publisher for the atlas he’d been dreaming of for the Snoqualmie Pass zone. We decided to work together. Countless hours and a dozen drafts later, we’d created a “first of its kind” atlas. And after a full year of drooling over the hundreds of aerial photos of thousands of ski lines, I took the first excuse I could muster up to fly out and ski with Schonwald and friends.

Moe Trees Please

We begin crossing the aptly named Snow Lake in a total blizzard, and the snow intensifies to a rate I have never experienced in my life. The flip side of living in sunny, cold Colorado, is that we rarely see rates of more than one inch per hour, and even more rarely do we see a single storm produce more than twenty inches, so this was new to me. Although Matt was not an official mountain guide for the day, I could tell his decision-making and wisdom do not waiver thanks to his hundreds of days as a guide.

We start to question our plans. What had started as a mission to maybe check out the Holy Diver or Oyster Couloir effortlessly morphs into a tree mission. Though our group is big, the decision is swift: It’s dumping, conditions are changing rapidly, and the tree skiing will be all time deep! Enough said, we chose Moe Trees. If the day would never end, I could do laps here for the rest of my life and be content.

When we finally admit that the light is fading, we head back across Snow Lake, wet, tired and delirious over what we had just experienced. Our friend Truc knowingly asks me “So Andy, what do you think of the Cascades?” Laughing, I reply, “Well, the secret is out: your rain is incredibly white and fluffy!”

Seattle's Public Pow Playground

Skiing at Snoqualmie Pass began in the 1920’s and has been going strong for nearly 100 years. Skiers used to have to hike up the hill in order to ski down, but Snoqualmie’s slopes started gaining appreciation and popularity in the early 30’s, and for the first time, in 1931, the Snoqualmie Pass highway was left open for the whole winter in order to keep the ski momentum building.

It grew so quickly that by January of 1932 the Seattle Times wrote that “the whole world seems suddenly to have gone skiing.” In 1933 the Seattle Parks Department applied for a permit from the USFS to set up a ski jump on the pass and the USFS granted a special use permit to the city for a “Public Playground”. With that, Seattle opened one of the nation’s first municipal ski areas. The city’s involvement allowed for greater public access to the sport. This was a risky time for such ventures, as it was in the midst of resource scarcity caused by the Great Depression, but it gave the locals a way to get their minds off the bad and focus on the good; fresh pow. In 1940, the city got out of the game and the land went to private companies who made many structural additions and changes over the years like rope tows and lifts, to the ski resorts you see today.

Due in part to the vast terrain, barrels of fresh pow, and many access points, the number of skiers on Snoqualmie Pass continues to climb today. Although you aren’t likely to be the only ski tourer out there, the opportunities for stashes and surprises abound.