Skiing in the park, no two stroke help, whaaa?? Been wanting this one since I started skiing at the hill, its S-shaped remnant glacier strikingly stark in the summer.<\/p>\n
Ian and I got up extra early and went up Hoodoo Creek, continuing on past the end of the trail on worn rock and tangles of driftwood. The snow took quite some time to start appearing underfoot, is it summer skiing already? Once we got to the top of the valley, the line looked like crap, a cliff guarding the bottom, a lower unskiable choke through proud choss, then the rest of the line looked like just slalom thru more choss, with maybe a choke higher up. Ian decided he wasn’t feeling it, so I continued up on my own. It couldn’t be that bad..?<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n I skinned around the lower cliff on avy debris and crust-over-isothermal. I stashed some things at the base of the main fan and started up toward the first difficulty, the chutes that penetrated the second cliffs. I decided to go left, as the lookers right chute looked like a relatively long mixed-ice climb to do without protection. I did the lower part of the cliff in a few big moves, then found a rib to traverse to dispatch the upper part. All that’s left now is 1100m of bootpacking, easy.. not.<\/p>\n I went up on just crampons for a while, finding nice, wide sections that led the right way. The snow got progressively less solar effected (from previous days), until it got deep enough to warrant plates. There were ice crystals blowing off the cliffs above, sometimes forming into small sluffs that wet me out as the day wore on. As things got steeper and I more worn-out, I started counting steps to motivate myself, which became harder as I got onto the glacier and overhead hazards went to nil, one less reason to move fast. Every time I stopped, I couldn’t help but look back to Mt Vaux’s ridiculous south face, peppered with choss and plastered with snow where there shouldn’t be. Could be a really sweet line for the right kind of nutbar.<\/p>\n