Friday the 13th, 4:20 pm, and we were rushing through our checklists making sure that we had everything. We were going to need gear for an eight day trip to Oregon. We finally loaded up and were out, making time to visit some friends for a beer in Portland. A short nap along the way, and we pulled into the Diamond Lake Resort early the next morning to buy our sno-park permit. We arrived at the Mount Thielsen sno-park and clumsily threw our gear together for a rushed ascent up Thielsen. There was a plan of being there earlier, but things changed. We quickly decided to get one good off the top.
Friday the 13th, 4:20 pm, and we were rushing through our checklists making sure that we had everything we were going to need for an eight day trip in Oregon (excluding driving days down and back). We finally loaded up and were out, making time to visit some friends for a beer in Portland. A short nap along the way, and we pulled into the Diamond Lake Resort early the next morning to buy our sno-park permit. We arrived at the Thielsen sno-park and clumsily threw our gear together. We would have to make a rushed ascent up Thielsen. Though the plan was to be there earlier, but things change, so we decided we could probably make one good lap of it.
Ski touring up Mount Thielsen
We made good time, but the constant monotony of touring through the forests in Oregon can be mentally difficult; tree line for most areas is around 8000′. However, Mt. Thielsen also begins gently and then rapidly arises sharply into the air. As the terrain began to steepen, we knew that views were shortly at hand. The forecast for our week has been anything but consistent, and a lot of the weather predictions have been a wishy-washy 50% good/50% bad, so we don’t know til we go.
Mount Thielsen held decent weather for us, but as we neared the top, we began to see increasing precipitation and lowering visibility. We concurred with an elderly local who had told us that “Mount Thielsen is WAY to dangerous. You best do your ski thing on Bailey. You can’t get to the top.” He was right, we weren’t going to be doing any 4th class rock scramble up the last summit block of Mount Thielsen, at night and during increasingly bad weather, but we would get a good ski line.
Snowboarding Mount Thielsen
And we dropped about 3000′ making it back to the car to set up camp for the first night just after dark. Not a bad day for starting at 1:00 pm. 8 miles RT, and lots of good tree skiing or alpine lines to be had…most importantly, POWDER turns.
