On a Saturday in March 2010, Alex called and woke me up at 8am. He suggested we go outside for some randonee skiing, and by 8.40am we were in the car going up towards the mountains. Vlad had been out the day before and was exhausted from that adventure. Without Vlad's usual preparation and resarch, we ended up with the kind of less organized, more ad-hoc outing caused by Alex' and my take-it-as-it-comes approach. Since there had been a bit of new snow in the last few days, and avalanche danger was at "Moderate" (as opposed to "Low"), we wanted an objective with very low avalanche danger. Mt Catherine, which has plenty of trees all over it, fit the bill. Since we had gone up the south side and west ridge of the mountain before, we decided to try going over Hyak and up the north face instead this time.
As soon as we reached the bottom of the Hyak ski run, we ran into the first challenge of the day: Alex forgot his skins. We debated going home again with our tails between our legs, or finding a place to buy some skins. But in the end we figured we'd get a good workout and to spend some time in the outdoors even if Alex would have to post-hole all day, so we started up the hill.
We quickly got to the summit of Hyak; me on skis and Alex laboring in boots. From there we took to the cross-country trails, faking cross-country skating with our randonee gear.
We got as close to the north face of Mt Catherine as the cross-country trails will take you. Just as we reached the end of our cross-country tour, we ran into a group of cross-country skiers. They were wondering about our weird skis and why we had ice axes. When we jumped off the cross-country trail and headed into the deep snow of the forest in the general direction of Mt Catherine, they looked at us as if we were crazy.
My electronic watch compass didn't work reliably, and with our view of the surrounding peaks blocked by trees, we were navigating by gut feel. At one point we reached a stream. Alex started crossing, but I figured we needed to head more to the right. After a short discussion, Alex, against his better judgment, crossed back across the stream and we headed right. 3 minutes later we were excited to see some tracks farther on! When we reached the tracks we realized this was no time for excitement though, since the tracks were new and made up of one pair of skins, and one part of post-holing boots... We had walked in a circle and come upon our own tracks. Deciding to follow Alex' gut feel from now on, we followed ourselves back to the stream, and crossed it together. Before long we got a glimpse of the Mt Catherine summit through the trees and were able to lay a course towards the west side of the north face where the face is less steep.
Despite our attempt to reach the face at the less steep section, we found a rather sheer cliff in front of us after about 30 minutes. We turned west and walked along the bottom of the steep section for a while, with Alex post-holing through some seriously deep snow, until the incline of the face mellowed a bit. Then I put my skis on the backpack and joined Alex' post-holing as we headed straight up.
After a while we reached an area where the terrain got much less steep and ran into a ski track. This time the tracks weren't ours. They were a few days old and came up from farther west on the face. Apparently we hadn't found the least steep section after all. We considered following the tracks as they took the less steep approach from here, going farther east. But since we didn't both have skins we decided to keep post-holing instead and to take a more direct approach straight up the face.
Although there had been about a foot of snow in the last two days, the hiking was relatively easy among the trees. But when we reached an open gully almost at the summit ridge, we ran into 2-3 foot deep soft snow on a 30-40 degree incline (prime avalanche angles). But there were still plenty of trees around and we weren't very worried about an avalanche going off. With the deeper snow, upward progress got very strenuous. For each step up, you had to shuffle snow away with your knees, then kick into the snow wall in front of you as high and far as you could, before pushing away snow with your waist as you moved your weight to the forward foot.
Fortunately there were only about 200 yards of this deep stuff before we reached the summit ridge, and the summit itself was only 100 yards up the ridge. We didn't go up on the absolute summit since it was covered in a big cornice which could easily collapse. Instead we went around the cornice on the north side to get to the west side of the summit ridge, from where we were planning to descend.
After putting on our skis, we got a few turns of fantastic powder skiing before heading into the forest to the west. From our previous tour up Mt Catherine a few years ago, we knew the right path down, with several sections of widely spaced trees making for decent skiing, was to follow the ridge. But somehow we got ourselves too far south, missed the ridge and ended up in the thicker forest on the south face. With every foot of descent, we were disappointed to realized we were missing all the good skiing turns we had been aiming for, but to balance this out we were getting an adventure instead. We kept traversing to the west with hopes of catching the ridge again, first on skis and as the trees became too thick we started moving on foot. It was now around 4.30pm and it was getting darker. We weren't sure when the sun would set, but we were getting a little worried about having to bring out the headlamps even before reaching the bottom of the mountain. An hour later we realized our angle of decline must have been steeper than the angle of the ridge, because we never hit the ridge. Instead we came upon the cross-country trail which goes on the south side of the mountain. The trail came into view just as a snowmobiler in a red/white ski patrol jacket was driving by. He must have been doing the sweep at the end of the day, making sure nobody was left on the trail. Little did he know that we hit the trail 5 minutes after he passed by.
Happy to know where we were again, we started going down the cross-country trail back towards Hyak. The start of the trail is steep enough to ski down without effort, but after a while it goes completely flat and we had to switch to pretend cross-country skating mode with the randonee skis again. After some skating, the snow on the trail became so bad we switch to walking. After quite a while on the trail we finally reached Hyak again and enjoyed a few last turns on the skis to get back to the parking lot.