Cascadia

Highway 542 is a dead-end that leads to all the right things, like Mount Baker.

When everything lines up in the Cascades, like it does here for Sven Brunso at Mount Baker, the experience is otherworldly bliss.

The lost boys and former circus freaks stand on Shuksan Arm, waiting for the light to clear. We’re on the lip of Beast Ridge. The glaciated face of Shuksan, the spine-striped ridgeline synonymous with Mount Baker, fades in and out of fog in the distance. I cannot see shit. Finally, the sun breaks through the soup and hits the top of the ridge. I push off over the edge, point my tips, and luck into the kind of sustained vertical, deep snow turns that make it feel like gravity is bending around me.

This is the epitome of skiing in the Cascades: steep, snowy, solid, but still, somehow, scrappy. Weather-battered and variable, the 700-mile span of mountains splits the squall-soaked Northwest coast from the arid plains rolling toward the Dakotas. The Cascades stop storms, make their own weather, and receive more snow than anywhere in the world—as long as the snow line is high enough. You never really know until you pull into the parking lot. But when it’s deep, it is the deepest.

Despite all the snow, despite the Amazon-funded hordes thronging Seattle just a few hours away, the mountains feel empty more often than not. Like today. Sure, it’s Wednesday, but it’s been snowing, and even though we lingered over burritos and futzed with an airbag for a while, we still got third chair behind a crew of retirees on scratchedup Volants. If