On Saturday, I headed out with the crew for some training and touring in that order. The first leg was Little Pine Couloir, which twisted the emphasis to touring over training. Little Pine Couloir is pictured below.
Little Pine had heated and slid (probably on Thursday) and at the bottom we met a frozen debris pile. Questions were raised as to whether we were making the most of our time, but for whatever reason, we kept getting drawn further into the chute. "Let's just go up to the rock and see if it gets better above." After getting to the rock, our conversation turned to, "Well, we've come up this far, we may as well just go to the top." Here we are going to the top.
The conditions in the chute weren't optimal. Once we got above the death balls, we encountered variable snow conditions ranging from bullet proof ice to breakable crust to a nice 6 inch layer of graupel (little styrofoam ball-like snow). It was a constant debate as to whether to boot or skin. We did both. Suffice it to say that the chute was a time eater. It took us a little over 2 hours to climb the 3000 ft to the top.
The descent was fun. There was some decent snow at the top and then it progressively more "interesting" as we descended. Here's Sam showing some good technique.
The bottom shot looks like good pow. Really, Sam is surfing a graupel loose snow wave, not that there's anything wrong with that.
By the time we hit the death ball section, it was truly fascinating. Death balls are frozen snowballs that range from the size of a softball to the size of a soccer ball. They form when wet snow slide and rolls into a ball. They freeze and their life's purpose is accomplished if they can trip a descending skier and pitch him headlong down a 42 degree chute. With the right technique -- keep skis close together, stay on top of ski and apply relatively equal pressure to each ski on the turn -- you can blast through death balls, some of the time. It also helps to have one of those mouth protector thingys that football players use.
Here' a shot of Sam working the bottom, half-pipe style.
And here are expressions of the crew after skiing 3000 feet of character building snow:
Alex
Sam
Bart
As I mentioned above, the day started out with an emphasis on training, but that degraded quickly as we had to deal Little Pine. We had hoped to get in 10k vertical, but as we sat at the White Pine parking lot, it was 11:30, we had been out 3.5 hrs, and we had only 3k under our belts. I had to be back to the car by 2:30, and it was unlikely that we'd be able to pop out 7k in 3 hrs. Aiming to do our best, we headed the slope opposite of Little Pine -- Scotties. We climbed Scotties into No Name, followed the ridge above Snowbird and Gad 2 and then dropped west down through the Birthday chute area and into White Pine. Sam dropped back out of Scotties to make it to Provo by 2:00. Sorry, no pictures.
We then skinned up and drilled it to the top of Red Baldy. I didn't want to drill it, but had no choice because Alex went to the front and well, drilled it. We climbed 1800 feet in just over 1/2 hour and topped out at 11,000 feet on Red Baldy.
Our descent of Red Baldy was the best of the day. A long powder line. And we would have made it to the car by 2:30, except that we took a slight detour to climb a ridge to drop into Scotties, a more direct and powedery route to our cars. We made it back to the cars by 3:00 and had 8600 for the day. Fun tour. Good training.
