Made a trek out to Kwohl Butte from Mount Bachelor for some close and easy backcountry skiing right outside Bend, Oregon. The trek started at around 11:00 from Mount Bachelor’s summit after a few in-bounds laps to get the legs warmed up. Our posse consisted of two on touring skis with skins, one splitboarder, one snowboarder who decided to boot pack the whole trip, and myself with snowshoes and my snowboard on my back. The ride down to the base of Kwohl Butte took around 30 minutes and was much easier than expected. I only had to unstrap my board once for the ride and there was some really fun terrain to explore. Once at the base, it took about another 45 minutes for skins to be put on, splitboards to be split and for us to make our first ascent up the backside of Kwohl.
Upon reaching the top we ate some food and explored the ridge line before taking our first lap down the front face that you see from the road heading up to Mount Bachelor. We then hiked back up, circling around Kwohl as we did so, and ended up back on top of Kwohl across the bowl from our initial ascent, this time being on the ridge line looker’s right from Bachelor. From here we took some laps down into the bowl jumping off some small cornices before making our way back toward the backside from which we came. From there, with Bachelor in our sights, we took our final descent back down to the base of Kwohl. For the hike out back to Bachelor we decided to trek it back to the Cow’s Face cat track. This took around 75 minutes of pure uphill trekking. We made it back down to the Skyliner parking lot at about 4:15, tired and fulfilled after a great day skiing and riding some new terrain.
