Headed up to Shasta with Jon.
4-5 feet of snow at Bunny Flat.


Smoooooth snow


Full moon






Left the parking lot at 3:30am
The moon was super bright.
Didn't think we needed the headlamps, but
they helped in the shade of the woods.

Did I mention the moon was really bright?


Jon looking for something to eat.


The moon setting was awesome!






The snow was pretty firm.
I took the steep line straight up to 50/50 flat.
Ended up sidestepping up most of it. Hard-as-rock ice.
Sketchy edging in free-heal mode with my lifters on high
made for some exciting climbing.
Could have used some ski crampons for my Dynafits.
Jon decided to take the gully up.
We met up at Lake Helen.

It was super windy. When we got to Lake Helen, the wind was
spitting chunks of ice down on us from above.
Trinity Chutes and Red Banks were covered with ice and snow.
We talked to several people that had stories of folks getting
tagged by the the flying ice.

We took shelter in one of the tent pits.
Jon chillin'.




I'm all covered up against the wind.


Jon didn't like all the steep ice for skinning, so had
gone to crampons earlier on.


Jon lying low trying to stay out of the wind/flying ice chunks.


Close-up of Trinity Chutes from Lake Helen.


Red Banks


Jon had put his skis on the pack when he went
to crampons and was getting tossed around by
the wind on the way up.
The big fat skis acted like a sail. I almost got thrown down
by the wind skinning up.

Some video from Lake Helen.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MrJibmstr?f ... YV9nGXBQI8

We decided to head on down.
The snow was pretty firm at first, but soon turned
to perfect corn!

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrJibmstr?f ... JteNXAMi_c

Awesome skiing!!! Super smooth snow.
Thanks Jon! Had a blast (literally).

_________________
Coastal Crest Snow Patrol
http://www.zazzle.com/jibmaster
http://www.earnyourturns.com/3878/ccsp-guide-2-mendocino/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jibmaster/

Good shots! Especially nice moon pix. Man, that's a lot of snow in the Heart and chutes area for June! (but of course it's a lot of snow *everywhere* for June).

One thing I forgot to mention - on the drive back down the 5, the air was so clear.
I forgot to take pictures, but as we were driving down the 5, the views were amazing.
Looking back, we could see Shasta.
To the east was Lassen.
Over to the west, the Coast Range.
Normally, this much visibility is not possible, but we could see
from north-south-all at once,

Black Rock Mountain/North Yolla Bolly
South Yolla Bolly
Black Butte
Snow Mountain

All these mountains visible at one time!

Still more snow on South Yolla Bolly than you could shake your ski pole at...

_________________
Coastal Crest Snow Patrol
http://www.zazzle.com/jibmaster
http://www.earnyourturns.com/3878/ccsp-guide-2-mendocino/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jibmaster/

great pics jibmaster, thanks! heading up today myself. Hey, please make your pics smaller res. I end up deleting some of them. your size is right, but for internet purposes they should be 72 dpi and medium res. I've started making mine lower res because you and I put so many on there, people don't want to wait to load them all at higher res.

you rock! see ya

_________________
Mike Schwartz
www.thebackcountry.net
mike@thebackcountry.net

Just to add one thing to the photo guidelines:

Please shoot for 800-900px wide, and file size around 150-180kb. There are free programs out there for image resizing and jpeg optimization. If your program gives you the choice, save as jpeg optimized+progressive, that saves a few K too and loads better -- the browser is informed of the size before the rest so it does a better job of laying out the forum page.

The obvious exception would be our Panorama thread, where any width is fine but height should be around 400-600px. File sizes up around 400kb make sense in that location (only).

Well that sucks.
How 'bout these?
640x480

_________________
Coastal Crest Snow Patrol
http://www.zazzle.com/jibmaster
http://www.earnyourturns.com/3878/ccsp-guide-2-mendocino/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jibmaster/

you guys can put pictures on our website anyway you want obviously, we are really psyched to have them. If you're a good photographer, go for it. I'm the one who hogs up the load time for the most part.

I'll make multiple shasta threads and include links of past threads right on there. Eric is going to have a new forum built custom for us where you don't have to wait for every picture in every reply to load.

_________________
Mike Schwartz
www.thebackcountry.net
mike@thebackcountry.net