| Summary | |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2005-03-15 17:02:54 UTC-0500 |
| Description |
BC Skiing Duke's Trail near Mt. Cardigan Date: March 10, 2005 Location: Manning's Trail to Firescrew Summit, Duke's Ski Trail The Crew: Justin Fitzpatrick and Chris Glazner Author: Chris Glazner Trip Report We're getting bad. Justin emails: so the rain has turned to snow up north, and the NWS is saying 6-10 inches in some places, with the snow tapering off wednesday evening. i'm working my ass off today and tomorrow, but i think i might call in sick on thursday. So, me, weak-willed that I am with a semi-flexible Thursday schedule, give in and agree to a mid-week backcountry ski. The condition: we had to be back at MIT in time for a 3:00 meeting with my advisor. No problem. We set our sights on Duke's Trail, off the summit of Firescrew, next to Cardigan. Justin did the trail the previous weekend with Natalia and Mike Whitson, and wanted more. While they were doing that, I was on a lower trail with Summer, Greg and Kristina. So, we wanted to get back out and try it with 6-10" of fresh snow on it. We left at 6:30, and got to the AMC cabin there around 9, I think. There was only one other car there (which is quite amazing for those who have only been there on a weekend). We put on skins and headed up the Manning Trail. There was one other track in the snow, but it quickly diverged to some mellower XC trails. The skin up was a lot of fun, even thought eh snow was deep and we were breaking trail. It was an absolutely gorgeous day--couldn't have asked for more. We stopped for a couple minutes a little over halfway up to grab and snack and a drink. Just below the summit slabs, one of my climbing skins slipped off. We stopped, cleaned it off, and put it back on (the narrow tail on my skis aren't the best for keeping skins attached!). A few minutes later, on a steep, very snowy section, the same thing happened. Seeing as we were near the top, I just threw it around my neck and barebooted up the summit slabs. As soon as we got to the slabs, the snow totally changed from deep, soft powder to funky, styrofoam windslab. It looked heineous. It was heineous. For some reason, we kept going up. We took a break at the summit, and ate a little food, and then geared up for the descent. I was ready with video for Justin's first turns. Well, remember what I said about the snow condititions? That stuff just isn't skiable. We decided that any footage resulting from this trip would be "for educational use only", and not distributed :). Let's just say it wasn't pretty. You couldn't really turn, and when you did, you were in total survival mode. We took a line from the summit that headed too far east of the top of Duke's Trail, so we had to bushwack over, which wasn't a ton of fun. (Where's Greg when you need him for this stuff?) We soon reached the trail, dropped into the powder run we've been dreaming about all year long. To our dismay, while we were munching on the summit, a splitboarder had skinned straight up Duke's and turned around and the top to steal our first tracks. Oh well. See, the problem was we had only been dreaming about powder runs all year, and not actually skiing them. So, we had a quick lesson in powder skiing, and then enjoyed the rest of the relatively moderate trail back down. Duke's has a very mild grade, and even a few smaller traverses. It was over very soon. We were hoping to have nice few turns down the big slope in Duke's Pasture, but someone had apparently been skiing just that slope all morning learning how to ski, so it was really tracked up. (We later saw his trip report on telemarktips.com, and added ours to it). We made it back to the car and boogied back to Boston, stopping only for salsa Doritos and 69 cent any size fountain drinks in Bristol. You know what? I made that meeting with my advisor with 15 minutes to spare :) |