Alpental Was Heaven Last Thursday

Think back to last week, what happened in your life on Thursday night? Specifically, at around 7:30pm, where were you, and what were you doing? Seattlest was in night-skiing heaven, a place we never before believed could exist.

We hiked up a ridiculously steep peak on the south side of Alpental, following a knee-deep boot packed trail through powder to the knoll at the top of Shot 8. The moon was almost completely full, the sky cloudless. Constellations pulsated all around us, their presence was nearly three-dimensional. The air was so crisp we could see well past Hyak, and the pillows of powder we sat in at the top of our hike twinkled like a carpet of miniature bling as we passed around a flask of Lagavulin with our friends. We then stayed left of the route to Shot 8, and took about 4 steep turns down a chute of nearly untracked powder, dropping down into Billy Bowl. The heavy silence was broken by everyone hooting and whooping, drunk not on single-malt scotch (the flask wasn't that big), but with the ridiculous beauty of an evening in the Cascades unlike any we've ever experienced within the boundaries of a ski resort.

Photo (not of Alpental, we couldn't find any via Flickr and had forgotten our camera) from Flickr user 'wok.