Silver Star Mountain/Silver Star Creek

Stats:  10.5 hr C2C, 5.8k gain

GPX: https://www.peakbagger.com/climber/ascent.aspx?aid=2823623

Report:

Started at the trailhead at 6am with quite a few other parties. Patchy snow for the first 800' before continuous skinning. For as bad of a rap as the approach gets, it really isn't that bad. You do have to cross logs while booting and skinning, but most were small or easy enough to cross. We stayed east of the creek until 5k and found an easy spot to cross, and the slide alder didn't impact our ascent much either.

We started ascending the east facing slopes around 8:30 and the snow was already softening quickly in the warm sun. We took a break in the basin at 9:30 before ascending to the glacier and saw a large rock fall off a SE aspect on Vasiliki ridge which caused a decent sized wet loose avy.

Going up the north slopes to the glacier, ski crampons were nice to have, but the snow was grippy. As we got onto the glacier the snow turned into a breakable crust, and then into 6-8" of dryish snow with no crust. Glopping became a major issue. We hit the col by noon, dropped our skis, and followed the boot track to the summit. The couple rock moves to the true summit were much easier in approach shoes, but someone made it work in boots and pons. We brought a rope and utilized the newish looking rappel anchor to make getting back to the snow a little easier.

We started our descent at 2:20 and enjoyed 6-8" of now hot pow all the way down the glacier and back into the basin. We exited via the west facing slopes which skied quite nice until we hit lots of debris closer to the creek. Unfortunately we had to transition again to skin back a mile along the flatish creek, before we got a final 900 feet of narrow tree skiing on soft snow, and then skis on the back for the last 700 feet back to the car by 4:20.

All in all, a beautiful day in the north cascades with surprisingly good ski conditions top to bottom!