The spring had been weird. The cascades, along with much of the west, received a huge late April storm cycle that led to some of the best powder days of the season arriving when people started to either hang up their skis or look to bigger objectives. In Washington, the storms stuck around, and aside from a few weather windows here and there, May started shaping up to look a lot like mid-winter. Long, rainy, albeit warm days filled the forecasts and doused my plans for big volcano objectives. On our weekly Wednesday after-work ski tours, Rob and I had been visiting the safety of the treed slopes under Kendall Peak in Snoqualmie Pass, because avalanche danger was relatively high, and ski conditions were relatively poor. On a few of these days, the East Couloir of Guye showed up to give us ideas for when conditions improved.
An SLC local posing in the front of the glowing East Couloir of Guye
Rob floated the idea to me early in the week, under the premise of “needing something chill” after his recent trip into the enchantments. With a weather forecast that looked less than ideal, I said yes with an assumption that we probably wouldn’t actually do it. I like to approach things with the mindset of “It won’t go” and let the conditions I encounter that day convince me otherwise. We planned to cross Commonwealth, head up the drainage between Guye and Cave Ridge, and take the ridge to the summit of Guye, where the East Couloir dumps you back to Commonwealth Creek.
This is definitely the proper approach, even though the guidebook describes the approach for the East Couloir as just booting straight up the thing. The ridge is easily accessed, easily navigated, and if conditions don’t play out, the ski back down is fun & easy to stay safe with good terrain choices.
On Wednesday, Rob and I found ourselves atop the ridge and were observing darn stable conditions as we marched our way towards the summit of Guye. Better yet, the rain that was predicted to roll in around 4pm was way behind schedule, giving us some great views of Alpental valley and the surrounding Commonwealth basin.
As the summit came into view, we saw two climbers post-holing their way down from the summit. They had climbed the south gulley, and were going to descend via the Cave Ridge drainage. Rob and I decided to make a quick rappel into the East Couloir’s entrance, because the climbers had plunged and post-holed their way up from the top of the south gulley, making the entrance a bit technical on skis.
During the short rap, Rob and I debated who was cooler, us or the climbers. We quickly determined us, because we didn’t have to post-hole back to the car, and clicked into our skis.
Rob down-climbing a bit to get past the boot holes
The skiing was pretty darn pleasant, although I’m not sure how much of that is an acquired taste from really starting to enjoy heavy rain pow in the trees in recent weeks. The couloir was a sustained 40-ish degrees, and required short hop-turns most of the way to the choke. Seconding Rob most of the way, I found a few rocks, but mostly good midweight corn. Like skiing a snow-cone. Encountering a small rock band in a steeper section, we kicked a small slab down it and watched it take a bit of the loose surface snow with it.
At the choke, we decided to rap, although it could possibly have been downclimbed. We thought that since we had the gear, we might as well use it, and were pretty happy we did. There were some big moat-holes around the steep rock faces that were covered only by a thin veneer of snow. At the bottom, we pulled the rope and skied the remainder of the couloir’s apron in heavy pow that led to a massive slide path.
We skied trending south and eventually found ourselves at Commonwealth Creek, which required some interesting tree bouldering to cross this far down the valley. We skied the classic Commonwealth luge track and popped out along the highway, where a semi truck driver getting head in the Snoqualmie West parking lot awaited us. Another successful post-work skimo adventure!