The view of the Three Sisters from Bend, Oregon is incredible. These mountains are a rarity in the volcanic world, being that they are so close together. The summits of the Three Sisters span a distance of just five miles and have over fifteen glaciers. Some years you can ski well into July. In the late 1800s they were known as Faith, Hope and Charity, beginning from the north.  It makes sense that the North Sisters was named Faith.    

The Summits of these mountains have been drawing me in for years. The Middle Sister sits at 10,047 ft. This will be the last ski for the spring.  The snow is melting fast.  

Jamie and I drove from Bend to Sisters, up and over McKenzie Pass, through the 2,600 year old, sixty-five square mile lava flow to the Obsidian Trailhead at Frog Camp to begin our journey up.   

We got to the trailhead around 5pm with plans of sleeping in the back of the truck and getting started around 3am for our 14 mile hike.  The mosquitos changed our minds, so we packed up and hurried out of there, hiked about 3 miles to a good bivy spot and slept outside under a tree.  Got up around 4am and headed up to the snow. 

We skinned up the expanses of snowfields between the Renfrew and Collier Glaciers to the Hayden/Renfrew pass. From there we hiked with our skis on our packs up the north ridge to the summit.

We hung out on the top for a little while and enjoyed the views and the sun.

I tried to fly my kite, but the wind wasn't blowing hard enough.  Can't complain about that. 

So we skied.

We reached the snow line, switched up our gear, took a break next to a stream, then hiked back to our bivy site and reloaded again for the few miles back to the truck.

Back to the car by 1pm. Another beautiful day in the mountains and our 17th Volcano! 

The snow is melting super fast in Oregon.  It's been really warm lately.  Last week skiing on Broken Top the snow was basically done by 9am, so we decided to get a nice alpine start on McLoughlin.  The plan was to head to the northwest side, in hopes of skiing the NW bowl where the sun wouldn't destroy so early.  Jamie and I drove the truck all the way around to the Twin Ponds trailhead where we discovered all the snow at that elevation was melted and we would have to bushwhack through the relentless brush for hours.  We scouted around for a good hour trying to decide whether or not it was worth it.  Finally, we decided to bag the NW bowl and just hike the normal route and ski the NE bowls. 

We got to the trailhead on Sunday night about 7pm, tried to sleep by 8pm, so we could wake up and be ready to hike by 2:30am.  We were hiking through the dark forest with our headlamps by 3.  Luckily, hiking at this hour, you're basically asleep so you don't really realize you're walking and plus, the mosquitos are still sleeping.  At about 5am the sun started to rise.  It was beautiful!

Soon enough we hit snow and the tree line and got our first views of the summit and the northeast bowls.

Jamie and I reached the Summit at 7:30, hung out for a half hour or so to let the snow soften a little.

About 8:15am we skied down 2000 ft of beautiful corn in the northeast bowl!

At the bottom of the bowl we stopped on a big flat rock on the terminal moraine, ate "lunch" and took a short nap before the five mile hike back to the car.