Ruby Redemption: Skiing Ruby Mountain in the North Cascades

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you may have noticed that trips and adventures don’t always go as planned and sometimes objectives require multiple attempts before we’re successful. This was the case for Ruby Mountain in the North Cascades. In May of 2021, Alex and I started our tour at the Happy Creek trailhead bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We knew the day ahead of us would be arduous but we felt we were adequately prepared both mentally and physically. It turns out we were wrong.

Backcountry Ski Trips, North Cascades, Washington, Winter TripsSonja SaxeMay 24, 2022 Comment

Juneuary in Washington: Skiing Loowit

This January offered a string of sunny, warm weekends with relatively low avalanche risk, resulting in many to dub the month Juneuary and head off on adventures usually relegated to the stabler spring months. Alex and I couldn’t let an opportunity to climb and ski a volcano in the depths of winter pass us by so we, too, headed for the mountains. We make it a goal to ski Loowit (Mount St. Helens) once per year and chose this for our Juneuary destination.

Backcountry Ski Trips, Mount St. Helens, Mountaineering, Washington, Winter TripsSonja SaxeFebruary 10, 2022 Comment

An Encounter with Icy Royalty in the North Cascades

The name Snowking Mountain elicits thoughts of icy royalty—a peak draped in a velvet robe of snow in an area that is so difficult to reach it feels as if it were guarded. Snowking resides in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, just on the outskirts of North Cascades National Park and while it may not be guarded in the literal sense, the route requires battling the terrain nearly every step of the way. In fact, one of the reasons this blog post has taken me nearly half a year to write is because of how shaken our experience on the trail left me.

Backpacking Trips, North Cascades, WashingtonSonja SaxeJanuary 11, 2022 Comment

Photo Diary: Calm after the Storm

Winter in Washington usually means spending endless days waiting out frequent storms just to see a brief glimpse of the mountains, but the landscapes those storms leave in their wake are nothing short of incredible. In late December, the Mt. Baker area received a whopping four feet of snow in five days. After the storm subsided, I headed out on a daylong ski tour in the Mt. Baker backcountry with my friends Nate and Scott.

Winter Trips, Washington, Backcountry Ski Trips, Mt. BakerSonja SaxeJanuary 4, 2022 Comment

Journey to Olympus

Deep within Olympic National Park, surrounded by the verdant Hoh Rainforest and a winding network of rivers, lies the park’s crown jewel: Mount Olympus. At 7,980’, this peak is the tallest on the Olympic Peninsula and offers a birdseye view of the park. However, getting to the summit is no walk in the park, the trek requires 19 miles of hiking before visitors even glance a view of their lofty objective.

Olympic, Washington, Backpacking Trips, MountaineeringSonja SaxeJuly 17, 2021 Comments

Skiing Ruth Mountain

I first saw Ruth Mountain in the summer of 2019 while Alex and I were hiking the Copper Ridge Loop. We were on the early stretches of the trail, making our way toward Hannegan Pass when a beautiful mountain face, its upper slopes still draped in snow in late summer, came into view. In my planning process for that hike I had been so fixated on the camp spots and other high points that I had entirely overlooked Ruth Mountain, but it was impossible to overlook on the trail, it dominated our views. As we got closer I said to Alex, “I’m pretty sure you can ski off that. We should do that!” 1.5 years later and we did just that!

Backcountry Ski Trips, North Cascades, Winter Trips, Washington, MountaineeringSonja SaxeJune 2, 2021Comment

Spring Summit of Mt. Hood

I pressed the start button on my Garmin watch and checked the time. 1:04AM. Above us, billions of twinkling stars painted the sky. I was thankful for the calm and clear conditions that would accompany us on the climb ahead. We couldn’t see the finer details of our objective for the morning, but we knew its presence was there. Its hulking mass of rock and ice covered slopes blotted out a huge portion of stars on the northern horizon. It acted like a black hole, obscuring any light and drawing us in like a magnet.

Oregon, Mt. Hood, Winter Trips, MountaineeringSonja SaxeMay 14, 2021 Comments

Royal Skiing in the Olympics

It feels like spring ski season in the PNW! After a winter that required me to postpone or cancel ski trip after ski trip due to storms or dangerous avalanche conditions, winter has finally seemed to have relinquished its hold to spring.

A few months ago, our friend Nate invited Alex and me to go on a spring trip with him into the Olympics for a snowy ascent of Mount Deception or a circumnavigation of Mount Deception, whichever seemed like the better option when we got there. We both eagerly agreed to the trip and looked forward to for the remainder of the season.

Olympic, Backcountry Ski TripsSonja SaxeApril 18, 2021Comment

A Fortress of Glaciers: The Mt. Baker Orbit

In late 2019 Alex and I signed up for a ski mountaineering course on Mt. Baker with Pro Guiding Service. After a few seasons of backcountry touring we were feeling limited by our lack of glacier travel and mountaineering skills. We had taken our AIARE 1 course and could travel and route find in the wintry backcountry, but we could not traverse onto the slopes of some of the more remote mountains in Washington because they were surrounded and covered by glaciers.

Backcountry Ski Trips, North Cascades, MountaineeringSonja SaxeApril 12, 2021Comment

Photo Diary: North Cascades Flightseeing Tour

In late October, Alex and I went on a trip that I have been dreaming of for years: a flightseeing tour over the North Cascades. I’ve long wanted to go on this flightseeing trip with Snowking Aviation, however, I had specific conditions in mind for our eventual flight. I wanted to fly in fall, after the first couple snowstorms coated the mountainsides in a blanket of snow, but the alpine lakes still remained unfrozen in their basins.

North Cascades, WashingtonSonja SaxeNovember 11, 2020 Comments