Kirk took this shot of Louie, backcountry skiing Southwest Chutes, Mount Adams. Score 9 for snow conditions. Breakable crust = 1, baby butt corn = 10. Today a few ski tracks and freeze lumps marred perfection.
Mount Adams Southwest Chutes, showing descent route. Most people climb via broad ridge to right. The egress traverse I marked is just a general idea, exact egress traverse route varies with snow coverage and skier choices.
One game I play is to mentally shortlist the best ski descents in the world. Such a list would be different for everyone, depending on where you’re at mentally and physically, and would change over time as your life progressed. These days I’d use something like the following score points:
1. Access; the route needs to be reachable by the common man, without mounting an expedition, trans-world jet travel, or conditions that only occur once every three years. Adams easily gets a 10 on that.
2. Safety; little chance of injury or death if you know what you’re doing. (Though I had a helmet lesson on this route when an ice chunk dislodged by skiers above smacked my foot like a cannon shell. If the target had been my head, I’d have been severely injured, but even a minimal helmet would have been a big help. Beyond helmets, lesson was when stopping and sitting, move on to the larger rock piles and ribs that’ll stop or deflect any rolling/flying projectiles. Due to likelihood of having other parties coming down above you, I’d give the Southwest Chutes a safety rating of 8, rather than a full and totally optimistic 10.
3. Snow conditions; avalanche-free corn snow likely. A 9 for us.
4. Route; has to be a king line. Adams Southwest Chutes, 10.
5. Vertical; big, but doable in a day. Depending on exact start and various small ups and downs, once you can drive most of the access road you’ll devour about 7,000 vertical to reach the Adams summit. The mountain looms around 8,000 vertical feet above surrounding lands, summit is 12,281 feet. 10.
6. Aesthetics; to score high the ski descent has to be on a beautiful mountain. In this case, good on that, also with sublime views of surrounding volcanic lands with various fire mountains jutting up here and there like something from a 1960s dinosaur movie. 10.
7. Culture; restaurants and coffee bars readily available before and after the trip, guidebook and GPS info available, quality beers can be had. Adams 9, classic routes out of Chamonix, 10.
8. Accommodations; high quality yet affordable camping or motels available for staging, preferable at or close to the start. Adams, 9.
9. Adventure; a bit of uncertainty resulting from objective conditions such as glaciers, or route finding details you have to figure out for yourself. But not so much ‘adventure’ you never return. In our case on Adams, guessing which traverse to exit on was key, and navigating the summit in a whiteout added spice. For our day of backcountry skiing I’d rate the adventure as a 10, without the cloud cap and with more knowledge of the egress route, I’d give Adams Southwest Chutes an 8 on this due to the crowded and beat-in trail to the summit.
10. Red Tape; due to yet another wallet scouring user-fee Adams goes down in this rating, but climbs back up because they don’t gate the access road but rather leave it to the public to snow bash as far as they want to the summer closure. Aside from the fee, no other government niggling I was aware of exists so we’ll still give Adams a high rating of 9.
With above in mind, Mount Adams SouthWest Chutes in Washington (state, USA) makes the cut as one of the world’s best ski descents. Does Mount Everest? Interesting question. Check the following for documentation.
Zach's photographic interpretation of how grand the Mount Adams SW Chute are. Mount St. Helens in background, Louie Dawson skiing.
You start low, nearly 7,000 vertical feet from the summit depending on where snow closure is on access road. That's big enough for a 10 score in the calories department.
On the backcountry skiing uptrack, about halfway through the lengthy climb. Summit looks close, but it is far. Ten hours round trip for us. Quite a few people skiing the chutes skip the summit. That seems totally reasonable. Since most of us had never summitted, we continued onward and upward into a cloud cap. Not the most inviting finish, but the reward burger would have tasted half as good if we'd done only 'half' the trip.
If the guy in the photo looks like he's reaching for his wallet, that's probably true. To me, the only downside of Adams is the seemingly ubiquitous user fees and permitting. I find it disconcerting that we're allowing government agencies the freedom to charge us these pesky fees when we already get taxed till our skin burns. The five of us ended up paying about $50, just for one peak climb. If we'd gone on to something like St. Helens or Rainier, the ding factor would have gotten ridiculous.
Entering the cloud cap. Classic.
On the summit, a whiteout in the cloud cap inspired use of GPS. You could follow quite a few climber footprints, but had no way of knowing if they went the correct direction. Indeed, while we were wandering up there just before summit, we turned completely around and after a glance at the GPS realized we were headed back down instead of the last few feet to the top! Amazing how quick you can loose your orientation.
We had a party of 5, including competent backcountry splitboarder Zach, shown here riding the king line, Adams Southwest Chutes.
Southwest Chutes line is ridiculously big, around 4,000 vert and seeming as wide as the Columbia river. Nearly every photo we grabbed showed the skier-as-speck effect. Score 10 for size and drop of about 4,000 vert just for the chutes from the summit.
Dining to the sound of an impact wrench, having a local beer, near the trailhead. Score 9+ for amenities. Mandatory visit to The Station Cafe, where you can get a brake job after overheating your grabbers while driving down the steep access road, gas up, and have the best burger in the area. It's a guy thing, or a redneck thing, or some-thing -- but a 10 thing. Local motels are available, good camping at municipal park in town (coin op showers are expensive but work), or at trailhead.
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
