The royal/deception basin super-epic tour. olympic mountains WA
Date colon 4-20-07
Place colon royal basin, deception basin surrounded by nice alpine peaks including mt. deception (the second highest mountain in the olympics), and mt. mystery.
Participants colon Lani, zeedashbo, and lani's friend dave
The lowdown colon
After seeing an amazing trip report from Lani a few days earlier from a land not often traveled called the olympics, i received a call. Lani wanted more, and when he wants more, he can be quite coercive. I made the 'sure, why not' decision in my head and decided to skip work on friday. We met at dantes at 9pm and promptly left seattle with a nice beer buzz and a little sleep at 3 a.m. Through a blur of winding roads, a narrows bridge, a private road poop stop, and copious amounts of caffeine we arrived at the dungeness river.
We set off at dawn with cool temperatures and a brisk pace. everything was kind of fuzzy. it was a holiday after all.
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in what seemd like no time i was hiking in a foot of powder in tennis shoes
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but the views of impending deepness were spectacular
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after about 7 miles of hiking (5 walking, 2 skinning) we arrived in the royal (with cheese) basin.
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what could be a nice winter descent
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the farther up the basin we got, the more awesome got the views.
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Lani and Dave checking out mt. deception. "check out what i skied last week"
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the needles, time to get extreme.....some other time
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we hit the saddle on the east side of deception and got a glimpse of mt. mystery and some redonkulous stuff that is soooooo far away from any sort of trail or civilization that it's not that funny. (at this point, my ISO setting went to 80 and a bunch of my pics turned out uber crappy).
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then we skied into deception basin. lani getting some nice south facing corn.
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dave enjoying the same
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after around 800 vert of skiing we skinned up to the east saddle of mt. mystery as the clouds started closing in on us. looking back at the south face of mt. deception. super nice closeout lines.
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upon reaching the saddle i was beat down like a red headed step child. i really wanted to ski some pow, and the south/east face of mystery was not pow. so i let lani and dave head off to get the last 1,000 feet of gnar that is mystery and i set my sights on hal-foss peak which was 600 feet lower, but still over 7,000 feet and looked pretty damn powdery for a nice bit of vert. but it was not to be. as i climbed the first few hundred feet on the ridge it started to snow, and i couldn't even see lani and dave on the peak next to me. so i put on my longboard day sweater and waited for the crew to meet
me back at the saddle. i heard them scrape their way down the face in vertigo conditions (these guys have gigantic huevos) and i skied a few pow turns down to them.
with the conditions going shitty fast, we did what seemed right. we skied pow.
me
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dave
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and headed back to the royal (with cheese) basin to ski more north facing vertigo pow.
lani with the needles in the background
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z-bo doing the hippy pow thing.
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but i had to schmear it out for my polish devil brotha from anotha mutha
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lani promotes his ski siccness
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then we had to try our figure eights.
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we made it back to the car around 9 p.m. (lani around 8colon30, i think he was running so he didn't have to use his headlamp). it was definitely the longest day i've ever had hiking or skiing (a little less than a marathon) but definitely worth it. i'll be back soon. maybe with a tent and a huge trough of high pressure surrounding me.
gear notes colon Skis, skins, crampons (didn't use), ice ax (didn't use), a little water (free refills the whole way up) and a wet pair of tennis shoes.
