Harvey44 wrote
Fantastic pics.
skimore wrote
... one day's planned route involved 2000' of spruce jail hell, some small cliffs, a slide for life into the stream bed and a ski out by headlamp at 9pm...
Hmmm... any way to share some of the details behind this epic?
One wanted to try a new spot involving using 2 cars. We spotted a car at the finish point. Skinned up backside then partially across the summit. Had to boot it a bit on the summit. It started snowing and blowing pretty bad once we booted across. Visibility got very poor. We debated turning back but that would have put us out after night fall anyway. We were at our starting point and just wanted to get off the summit. As we started down their were small spruce traps everywhere. You'd be on top of one then the snow would cave in and you be up to your waist or deeper. We had few hundred vert of that. Then it turned into larger spruce so thick we were just squeezing through.Comparable to what you would find going off one of the ADK high peaks. This went for at least another 1000 vert. We finally made it to a drainage where we started to get some turns in. Then we'd encounter frozen icefalls of 20ft plus. So we end up crossing back and forth skiing the sides of the ravine. We then got to a point where the side of the ravine turned into cliffs and we could not go any further. There was a section that went down about 40' towards the creek bottom just before a cliff into the drainage. When I say down it was almost a cliff itself. It led to the drainage 10' above another 20' icefall. I jumped in and it was so steep all the snow slide off to bare ice. I got down without incident. Next guy slowly edged his way down. Next guy took his skis off. Bad move. He slide all the way to the bottom almost into the water and ended up chest deep in snow. His skis ended up above him 30'. He couldn't get back up from where he was. E had to climb up and get the skis. At that point it was dark. I cut a traverse across the top of the ice fall out of the ravine. We got up and out on the other side. We took a breather, rehydrated, ate little something and regrouped for the ski out. We then actually got a few turns in with the headlamps
Fun day.........we fired that tour guide
Who wants to join the next outing?
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