From March 20th to the 27th, the CU Backcountry Club rented a house in the Wasatch Range of Utah for SPRING BREAK! I was in Boulder visiting ex-UNSWOC president James Bultitude, and we couldn't turn down the chance to ski the famed Greatest Snow On Earth.
On Sunday night, I turned off I-15, drove up Big Cottonwood Canyon, and arrived at the house. $15 a night got me a spot on the floor, and in on a large, large supply of PBR and breakfast pancakes. Great to be around a lot of young psyched kids, as well as some more experienced guys, who are all keen on getting up and out to the backcountry. It was also good to see a decent-sized crew of girls on the trip.
After sorting out parking and gear (a minor epic), the evening began with passing around copies of "The Chuting Gallery", the famed guidebook to steep skiing in the Wasatch. With Monday forecasted to have reasonable weather and low avalanche danger, the hard core led by Drew and James proposed skiing the Y couloir. After imbibing enough to shock any Mormon, I put forward my "Sleep in and stagger out the back door around noon, and uh ski something mellow" plan.
The keen crew did end up getting out to the Y couloir (and got out minutes before a wet avalanche ripped down it!).
I ended up going with a group up to Wolverine Cirque in the Brighton backcountry. Instead of skinning up the obvious route from the dam, we elected to hike up Mt Millicent and along the ridge, and quickly got cliffed out trying to descend back into the cirque. Some scouting of a weakness in the ridgeline revealed a clean shot down a couloir.
I was very nervous dropping in on fat skis, if it was hard snow I would have been pretty effed. Plan B was to sideslip the whole thing if necessary! Amazingly, despite being almost a week since the last snowfall, it turned out to be plenty soft.
After a short skin, we were up into the cirque proper.
The east aspects and chutes (looker's right of the picture) were already roller-balling and point-releasing. Spoiled for choice on the north and west aspects, I just started bootpacking up the next west-facing couloir I could see! Unfortunately, the snow wasn't very consolidated, and I found myself wallowing, uncomfortable without any proper climbing gear, and concerned about the avalanche potential of the chalky slab I was punching through. The final straw was poor Nick yelling up that he couldn't follow.
I kicked out a platform, transitioned, and skied down the bottom half of the couloir, a bit bummed to have not made the best choices of terrain and route for the day. We got in one more run on sticky crud in a mellower zone, before we skied out to Brighton. Ah well, it was supposed to be a rest day, and I came to Utah to ski pow not lines!
The partying was a bit more subdued that night, as people kept it reigned in, in anticipation of a powder day in the morning. Still, there's always one dickhead that drinks too much, gets angry drunk, and vomits on someone's ski boots after yelling at everyone and the world in general at 2 in the morning (Fortunately, not my boots).
So on Tuesday we awoke to something like 12 inches of fresh and counting in Big Cottonwood. It was out the back door and up into some perfectly spaced Wasatch glades in puking snow. Amazingly, the wet snow underneath the fresh hadn't frozen at all, forming a very sticky bond with the new snow. And down low were we were skiing, well below the treeline, there was no wind at all! Unfortunately, the old wet snow still appeared to have a weak layer. Unlikely as a wet slide seemed, Pedro did some tests just to check, and I gained confidence there was a low chance of propogation on this deeper wet layer. Still, we moved zones from our ascent track to slightly less steep glades further around.
We had the whole place to ourselves and I got 4 laps in, about 1000m vertical? Fantastic tree skiing. Oh, and one madman (Drew H) carried enough tinnies for everyone in his pack, so we also shotgunned some beers.
The next day, we had another 3 inches over night, and it had started to clear. The storm total was about 16 inches. With most people pretty tired from the various tours that had gone down the day before, almost everyone decided they couldn't be bothered to drive anywhere, and head out into the "backyard".
Unfortunately, with about 16 people and confused goals, it quickly turned into a massive sh#tshow of awful group dynamics, and just terrible, unsafe decision making and lack thereof. And this with an avalanche danger forecast as Considerable. A few of the girls were so distraught at the way things were going, they were ready to just up and bail and go back to the house. With red flags like that, our epic powder day was quickly turning into the kind of disaster people write New York Times feature articles about.
A smaller group of us managed to just stop and chill the eff out for 15 minutes, discuss an actual trip plan and wrest back some control of the situation (And bluntly, I wasn't helping!). We made our way up to the crest of the ridgeline above Green's Basin and the Silver Fork, and got some good skiing in.
The best run was the run home through the big old pines of Matt's Basin. The shady north aspect and trees held excellent boot-deep Utah powder. A run to remember!
Then I partied as hard as I could, dragged myself out of bed mid-morning some time, shovelled out the car, and drove back to California.