Broken Top in the Oregon Sisters Range​

 

Route Description: I guess I have a thing for ending years with big objectives. In 2012 a group of us were in Bend and chose Broken Top as our objective.  The thing about Bend is that without a sled, there is very little accessible touring in the winter.  Also, in my young teens I did outward bound and hiked the sisters range for a week with the objective of climbing Broken Top. We never made a summit bid because of weather and because of the chubby east coasters such as myself who wanted to minimize the effort at all costs.  What we didn't fully process was that the tour was about 16 miles round trip with only around 1000' of fall line skiing in the winter as you start from the Bachelor parking lot.  The terrain, meadows, and forest is just spectacular out there, so its worth the trip to explore and we only saw a few other folks all day ( all of which sledded somewhere much closer than where we started). The lighting got flat for our descent, but we did manage to find some good snow and a nice line in the crater rim. There are clearly some cool objective lines in the rim as well as several on the outside I must  imagine. If your in the area and have access to a sled, I would certainly go back, or if you just want to get out and get exercise skinning around for the day its a fun place to explore.  A little bit closer you can access Ball Butte which had some nice lines as well.