Mount Shasta Skiing

Goeric and I decided to do some serious backcountry skiing this weekend. We headed out to the beautiful town of Mount Shasta on Thursday evening, and spent the night at the very authentic Mountain Air Lodge.
After talking to the local Ranger Bobs in the Morning, we drove to the "trailhead" (actually, the road was cut off by excess snow, and we had to hike 2.5 extra miles to get to the official start of the trail). We were the only ones leaving that day, as the weather was somewhat unstable, and avalanche danger was considerable. The climb on Friday was uneventful. We skinned a gentle slope all the way up to base camp and pitched our tent on a small plateau at 8,300ft. I was feeling rather miserable with a light case of altitude sickness kicking in, so I rested in the tent while Goeric went on to conquer a slope next to our camp. The next morning, we left for the summit at sunrise. We were making good progress on hard snow, keeping a reasonable pace of 1,200ft/hr. At 11,000ft the snow became very unpredictable, varying from too icy for the skins to grip, to too soft for crampons. I switched back and forth quite a bit, and I really got to love the fast adjustment of the Black Diamond sabretooth crampons that I had borrowed from Roetter Outdoors Works, Inc. Everything was going smooth, the mountain was beautiful and the cloud ceiling well below us offered amazing views. Then (at around 12,000ft) I suddenly started choking and our climbing speed dramatically decreased. At this point, I had to face the fact that I would not make it to the summit safely, so I decided to dig myself in at the top of the most skiable terrain, at 12,600 ft. Goeric went somewhat further (we were on a rocky ridge at that point, so there was no avalanche danger). For the full story on this beautiful trip, Goeric put together a movie available here. You can also find pix here.
The mountain humbled us this time but as true as our Governor is a 6-time Mr. Olympia: we'll be back!