Long, steep descent. Rocks hit: 0. Insert devil horns<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAfter the super rad descent, there was still a ways to go on moraines and crap to the far end of Quartz lake. On one creek crossing I broke through and got the skis soaked, and ended up spending half an hour chipping ice off the skis and bindings. Then after more poling, sidestepping, occasional skiing I was at the south end of Quartz lake at 1900m. There were cliffs dropping straight into the water, and I wasn’t about to risk a full submersion crossing the ice. So I skinned up through some really crappy thin cliffy xmas tree infested terrain on the west side of the lake. Such steep narrow lanes between trees you didn’t want to skin, but too many hollows to bootpack through. After a while the cliffs onto the lake relented and I was willing to risk just a wet foot using the ice by the shoreline.<\/p>\n
Now, which way to go? I was dead tired, so it wasn’t much of a decision to pass on the extra vert. Plus, it wasn’t far from being dark and I knew the summer trail, the whole north side of Wiseman and the logging road was an unknown. If I hadn’t got wet and had that extra time, I think the Wiseman exit would’ve been better. There looks to be a good lane on the avy path descent without alder to follow most of the way to the road, and the road itself looks to be a more consistent grade to the main Quartz road than the summer trail.<\/p>\n
But I was tired and felt I had got what I came for and headed down the summer trail. After a couple hours of torture and swearing I made it out to the road. I was hoping that in a perfect world I’d be able to catch someone heading down the road and back to Golden, but it was near dark and everybody had left already. The road had good sections of packed ice interspersed with gravel, and I abused the skis all the way to the highway, arriving in full dark. I was unable to flag down any oncoming traffic with my headlamp, and called up my roommate to pick up my spent ass. Then an hour and a half to unwind and eat then on to graveyard shift. 2000m of trailbreaking ascent, 2700m of descent, 13km of rad alpine traversing between Gorman lake and Quartz lake, 27km total.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who says you can’t do a ski traverse early season? I’ve been wanted to do a more gnarly version of this Northern Dogs traverse for a while, but dropping blind into the gnar isn’t a great way to do things. Thought by doing a Gorman-Quartz traverse early season, I’d get a good look at everything, … Continue reading Northern Dogtooth Range Traverse<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,4,5],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/DSCN6954.jpg?fit=1500%2C1125","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ZLTa-5i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":365,"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/365"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/perpetualski.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}