May 4-5, 2019: Six MAA mountain addicts (Vish, Kay, Frederick, David, Kevin, Todd) ascended Mt. Tom via the Elderberry Canyon route and slid on our butts much of the way down. Epic!

Four of us (Frederick, Kevin, David, Todd) were there as a team-practice/pre-climb for our planned ascent of Mt. Rainier via Liberty Ridge later that month (unfortunately we just canceled it yesterday due to nasty weather ... waaaaaaaaa!). Vish joined to further his training/prep for Denali, also in late may. Kay, new to the club was just stoked to climb. A couple friends (Steve & Karyn) skinned up on Saturday to ski, and hung with the gang before tackling the Elderberry headwall.

Saturday afternoon we worked on tuning our crevasse rescue skills. Time well spent in anticipation of Rainier & Denali. The weather deteriorated toward the end of the day, becoming quite windy and cold, however we awoke to bluebird skies on Sunday. 

Sunday morning we picked a chute with no visible avy activity to attain the ridge then navigated multiple false summits before reaching the top. Was a gorgeous day! We descended a less-steep snow field further north on the headwall which offered great glissading. After breaking camp we glissaded most of the approach snow field back to its end. I believe we logged well over 3K' of glissading for the day. Woohooooo!

We all had a great time, and a serious permasmile reaction to the trip!  ;)