Continued from Mount Wilson:

We found ourselves at 12,600. Only 1,400 feet to the top. I had some business to attend to, so Joe took off ahead.

I caught up a short while later and offered to take over stomping out the skin track for a bit. Joe obliged and I found my groove.

Joe and I have talked a bit about this “get the hell out” mode that I have. It usually kicks in on the way down, and I just don’t waste time getting back to the trailhead. Well today, for whatever reason it kicked in on the way up our 3rd peak of the day. I set the skin track up to the shoulder around 13,200. From here we could see and old boot pack doing an ascending traverse up to the ridge above. We followed this for a while, but opted to skin instead. The snow here was interesting. It was as though the top 5 inches were hollow (and they more or less were). This dirt layer has done some interesting things to the snowpack. As we crossed into an area on the slope where the sun was still out we began to feel a little weird about the snowpack. I threw in a switch back or two and we gained the ridge as quickly as possible.

We skinned up the corniced ridgeline for a while until we were forced to descend down to a small saddle. Here around 13,600 we finally put the skis on the back. I led away again and followed the old bootback as it wound it’s way up the ridgline to the false summit. Some of the steps were free, but most of them were still like making a new boot pack. We crested the false summit and were faced with the 50 foot downclimb. We made fairly quick work of this and found ourselves faced with just about 200 more vertical of uphill for the day.

I thought about climbing the ridge direct, but upon finding myself up on it, thought twice. At this point Joe had passed and was leading our way up the final pitch to the summit. We crested the summit somewhere around 7PM. We knew we had a little over an hour of daylight still left.

A rest, some food, and water were necessary.

Looking back on the day:

About 7:45 PM we dropped in to our final line of the day. We skied powder, crust, powder and more crust all the way down the couloir to the base where it was time to make a hard traverse to our left.

Joe:

Jordan:

Joe:

Jordan:

Joe:

Jordan:

We kept traversing left, left, left, and more left. We finally landed on the road about 200 yards down from the sled. I walked up and was oddly relieved when it started on the first try.

Our Line:

A couple nasty sidehills later and we found ourselves cruising down the road. I left Joe at the dirt and road the sled to the truck. I arrive around 9:30PM Joe showed up about 15 minutes later and helped me get the sled on the trailer. Afterwards Joe went straight to his car to go to sleep for a bit.

Personally I was in the mood for something besides camp food, so I went off to Telluride in search of a hot dog, pizza, a burger, anything. On my way in, my radar detector suddenly went crazy! I didn’t really know what the speed limit was, but naturally I put on the brakes and there he was sitting ahead on the side of the road lights off. On came his headlights and he flipped around and followed me for what seemed like about a mile before finally turning on his lights and pulling me over.

“Do you know why I stopped you tonight?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.” (Maybe I was drifting from lack of sleep)

“Well you were doing 48 in a 35”

“Really” (I honestly hadn’t noticed)

“Are you from around here?”

“No, originally from Denver, now Basalt.”

“Well where are you headed?”

“Honestly, I just got done skiing El Diente, Mount Wilson, and Wilson Peak, and I’m really just hoping that I can find some food that isn’t Ramen.”

“Holy Shit!, What would make you want to do that?”

“Good question.”

In the end he ended up showing me the way to the only place I had a chance of getting food at 10:15 PM, and he didn’t give me a ticket. Thanks! I got to pieces of pizza from the Brown Dog in town and began the weary drive back to the trailhead where Joe seemed a little more alive. We chatted about mountains, ski descent efforts, and all of the above over a few beers. We finally passed out around 1 AM and woke up the next morning ready to head back to our respective homes.

Thanks for Reading

JW.