Friday was a crazy day. It was a valuable day. This is a day that has given me much experience and knowledge. It calmed my fears and allowed me to grow. It was a day of ski mountaineering, a day that would be called “epic.”
I had the day off and I decided to go skiing. That was a good decision because Little Cottonwood Canyon received over a foot of fresh snow. I went out with Christian again. We were skinning up to Little Superior Peak by 8:30. We had pretty good conditions with good cloud coverage to keep the sun off the snow but it was still a little warm that day. That ended up hurting us a bit later.
The skin up to Little Superior took about 90 minutes. We decided to ski the backside, skin up, and ski down Little Superior. Christian started to check the conditions. He did a ski cut along the top of the shot that we were going to do. This set off a small wet slide that traveled maybe 30 meters at a slow rate. We expected this and decided that we were in business. Christian headed down first and then paused at the bottom signaling for me to go. It had been a couple of weeks since I had skied and I could tell. I didn’t feel as comfortable as I normally did. This was just our warm up run and I needed it. I couldn’t believe how fast I was going on the snow; the snow was heavy. I just felt so out of rhythm. We decided not to go all the way to the valley floor but to skin up the ridge just to our right and get back up to Little Superior.
As we were skinning up this ridge, the face looked so sweet that we decided to ski it. Christian started out and made a few turns down the ridge heading into the trees, the safest route. On his third turn he sent a huge wet slide off. It was about 10 meters wide, traveling about 30 mph (and gaining), and went all the way to the valley floor. We immediately decided to bag that run.
We skinned back up to the top of the ridge and hiked up to Little Superior again. This time was a little harder. The ambient heat had started to melt the snow on top of the knife blade ridge we were hiking. This made it extremely slippery and we were walking over exposed cliffs on either side of us. There must have been inversion set in because the peak, at 10900 feet, was warmer than the valley floor at 8800 feet. As we were walking up to our drop in spot, our visibility went to about 50 feet. That sucked, as we needed to get down before the snow conditions worsened even more. It would have been even harder to see the exposed rocks and cliffs in those conditions. We decided to wait it out but being ready to move at anytime. However, we had decided on hiking the ridge back till we arrived at a safe descent as a back up plan.
Fifteen minutes later our white out started to break. The snow was horribly rotten by this time of the day. Christian started out. Every turn he made sent off a wet slide. That was good for one thing and bad for a couple of reasons. It was good because the wet sliding snow exposed any barely hidden, underlying rock. Now we could see where not to ski. Even though we would be skiing only a turn or two at a time, hitting one of those rocks on a 45 plus degree slope could send one cart wheeling down the slope over some cliffs. The first bad part of a wet slide was that it was a wet slide on a hanging snowfield, meaning that it was suspended stacked snow on cliffs, not a mountain slope. A large enough wet slide could take out the hanging snowfield. The second bad part was now we had only the variable rotten bed layer to ski on.
So Christian skis down, clearly the way and taking his time. I was watching for natural slides above him. When it came for me to drop in I was quite hesitant. I was extremely nervous; you could tell in my breathing, which was shaky and irregular. I knew that I was out of shape for making demanding tele-turns; I was afraid of making a mistake and ending up tumbling towards a cliff; I was afraid of sending a big slide towards Christian. My heart raced as I made my first few turns, trying to stay in the path that Christian cleared to prevent sending down a new slide. I took my time as I tried doing jump tele-turns down a steep slope with exposed rocks. Once I made it down a little cliff band to Christian, I had calmed down. My legs were so exhausted. We continued down the mountain through the trees, not stopping until we reached the road.
We gave an exhausted yell of triumph; we made it down without getting hurt and we were out of danger. As we looked back up to see our descent, we saw that we caused the whole right side of Superior to slide bit by bit. We knew that we had just survived an "epic."
I have not had an experience that was more technically demanding than this day. I am very much grateful that the conditions were less than favorable and that things came about as they did. Now I will be able to remain calm when the situation quickly deteriorates on the mountainside. I now have a confidence that I can make it down a rock exposed slope in less than perfect conditions when needed. And confidence, not cockiness, is a key requirement in ski mountaineering.
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