PNW On-Hill Training Session

The On-Hill Training Session at Snoqualmie ran cool and smooth as ice... quite literally. A fortnight of freezing rain storms and the polishing effects of board and ski traffic officially transformed the Summit at Snoqualmie into the first man-made glacier (and we thought glaciers were going extinct). And to seal the deal for our Saturday training session, Mother nature dropped the temperature to a chilling 0 degrees.

Organized by the ever-so-fearless Lindsay Davis and led by the Talented Mr. (Patrick) Rigby, our group of volunteers became an army of effective instructors. On the other side of the mountain, I led the Sherpa group in an invaluable training filled with mentorship/community-development education and laced with lessons on glacier-sculpting.

Here are some pictures of our day:

Below is a photo of the recently born Snoqualmie Glacier. Don't let the soft-dust deceive you... the entire mountain is one gigantic ice glacier:

Here, you'll find volunteer instructor Steven Goodell using a banana-peel thermometer to gauge the temperature... yup, it's freezing:

Finally, the sun is setting on Snoqualmie. Night-time temperatures are our secret ingredient in glacier-making... the pretty colors are just for show:

Yes, that is a UFO in the top-left corner. So no, our glacier is not entirely man-made... aliens helped us, how do you think the pyramids were built?