Only the best day of skiing ever: Oakes Gulf 4/21

Summary
OwnerMITOC Gallery Administrator
Creation Date2007-04-22 13:40:41 UTC-0400
Description


Spring Skiing in Oakes Gulf
April 21, 2007
Chris, Josh, Cim, Yeuhi, Pat

Trip Report



Note – this was written for my blog slayinglittlebunnyrabbits.com where I have not been using any one's name so here is a key to the characters identities:

Huckleberry – Cim, Toma – Chris, Ali – Yeuhi, Igor – Pat, Josh – me (so creative)


The blog has the important pictures from everybody's collection, fyi.





I sent out the e-mail on Thursday, "anybody feel like sending it? Anybody think it will be safe?" No one thought it would be safe but 5 of us wanted to give it a shot. We decided that if we were going to try we were really going to go for it; we planned to leave Boston at 4am.



I left my friends party at 1am slept until 3:20 I don't remember what I did until 3:40 when I found myself in my driveway grabbing my helmet from my sister's car and Huckleberry pulling in so he could drive me to meet up with the rest of the crew at MIT. 4am on the dot, Toma, Igor, Ali (formerly Jose) where loading up Toma's Honda.



When I woke up again around, 7 we were almost there. Huck, Ali and I were lucky enough to sit in the back and sleep most of the ride up (thanks Toma, he drove from DC to Boston on Friday slept for about 4 hours and drove us all up to NH.) while Igor kept Toma awake until we reached Lincoln where we stopped for coffee. With a good 2 extra hours of sleep and a cup of coffee in me the ski-dorphins kicked in as soon as I saw how much coverage the backside of Mt. Washington had on it!



The week before had brought an opposite storm to Mt. Washington, which meant that the backside which is usually wind-blown bare to the rocks was well covered with snow. So much snow in fact that Igor declared "this looks like Alsaka!"



We pulled into the parking lot at about 7:30 and we were a bit disappointed to see that 2 other cars were already there. "I bet they didn't drive from Boston." Igor suggested but as we got closer I saw that they had Wyoming plates which inspired me to get out of the car and taunt them immediately, "not enough snow in Jackson for you, huh?" It turned out that they were headed for a different aspect than us anyway and it would be ok if they got first tracks because we wouldn't have to ski over them (for that matter we wouldn't have to ski over anybody else's tracks all day!) 7:45 and we were on the trail checking beacons. The approach trail was short and by 8 we were boot packing up the Monroe Brooke trail (I am not going to verify these names – in the hope that they are wrong and no one else ever goes where we went – it is ours! All ours!). The snow was still hard and the pitch was, well, steep.



Luckily our only fall on this ascent was me very close to the bottom. I pushed myself to skin up as high as I could before moving onto boot packing. This was a bad decision because not only do my hands have a host of new scabs on them but I ended up boot packing from further down than anyone else.



Around 10 we reached the summit house at Lake of the Clouds, where we decided to take a break and try gain back a few of the calories we had just lost. We also figured that if we waited a little bit; Oakes would soften up.



We were right! After skinning over the peak past the frozen lake, that I hear is home to the MITOC annual hockey game, we pulled our skins off for the first of many times. The avalanche danger was forecasted as low and all signs pointed towards a consolidated snow pack so we decided to dig a pit anyway. The pit proved us right and we were off!



No one else was anywhere around and our first descent granted us some of THE BEST snow you never skied (because you weren't there:) This first run was about 700 vft at a good pitch and made us all feel like pros as we bagged our first run at Oakes!



At the bottom of the first run we had some decisions to make. Do we head backup the same aspect we just skied and drop the huge boulder? Do we go a bit to the skiers left and shralp some steeper stuff? Should we go way skiers right and ski Double Barrel, a steep and narrow chute that just looked epic? Or should we head way skiers left and ski some Alaska style chutes with three rocky spines to choose from?



"Double Barrel first," Toma decided. As the name implies there are 2 chutes right next to each other, both very, very steep. Skinning up was not an option so we took turns leading, slowly making our way through, some extremely sun affected snow. We made our way past the crux of the skiers' right chute and decided skiing the top would not be worth it and decided to drop in from the there. The crux was also where the Barrels met giving us 2 options for a descent. Igor, Toma and Ali went left, Huck and I went right.



I ruined Huck's run. We had decided that to get past the crux (in this case it was a large bush that made for a small drop but required taking some speed into it and making a few quick turns to avoid the rock walls on either side) by sending it. I went first; I made my hop turn, headed over the vegetation, spotted my landing, dug my tips into the super sun affected man eating snow, rag dolled 20 feet, caught one ski and took a bow. Sadly I had left the other ski right under the vegetation where it had dug in. Huck was nice enough to grab my ski for me which meant he wasn't able to huck crux.



All of us seemed to agree that we would be better off skiing a different aspect so we strapped on skins on and made our way to skiers left of our first run. After my fall my cotton shirt was soaked and I decided I'd strap it to my pack to dry. This meant that I skinned up shirtless. But that was cool because I got this sweet match.com photo out of it!



On our way up we noticed about 5 other people skiing our first run but once again it didn't matter because we were headed away from them to some more untouched snow. We ended up on top of the Alaskan style chutes.



These chutes are steep. Igor decided to ski chute 1 and the rest of us pushed over one more to grab chute 2. Once again everyone laid down some silly sick lines and at the bottom we decided, 3 runs usually meant a good day so it would be ok to stop for lunch before we bagged 3 more.



Huck made a bench for us and Toma told some war stories about his brother while the rest of us soaked up some sun (I currently look like a cross between a raccoon and a lobster) and enjoyed the sensation of not pushing our bodies to their limits for a while. After I finished my lunch I walked over the ledge we were above and commented, "this would be a great place for hang-gliding." "really Josh, really?" Ali asked, "well, I guess I don't know." "That's obvious because I hang-glide and this would be a horrible place for it!" As I was about to walk off the 80 foot cliff to end the embarrassment Ali gave in, "I'm kidding I don't hang-glide, don't jump!" I didn't and a good thing because our next run was epic!



Skins on, coats off and we were back into action just in time to see 4 new people getting sloppy seconds on the chute we had just skied. They were a nice (given, they are BC skiers) group of middle aged skiers who thanked us for laying down skin tracks for them. As we set some more track for them to follow we ran into the first group of 5 we had seen. They were skinning up our original track that we re-joined. This group decided to try to make us feel jealous by letting us know that they took a cat to the summit while we had to boot pack in. (We weren't jealous because we actually had a helicopter ride in - not actually sure why the helicopter was there but I doubt it was good news) This group was led by an employee of the Mt. Washington Observatory (who hooked up the cat ride) who talked some pretty good back-country game along with the rest of his crew. We talked about trips we had taken and trips they had taken, discussed lines and offered up trip ideas until Igor was fed up and took off leaving the group in our tracks. "Thanks for laying down the super highway for us" was the last we heard as we pushed on and made our way to the top of the "steep run".



Double Barrel and chute 2 were steep, no doubt about it, but chute 3 was so steep that when Huck took out his steep-omoter (you know the devise with the little arrow that moves back and forth to tell you whether the slope is 1. Not steep you sally put the steep-omoter away. 2. This isn't steep but it could slide. 3. This is steep, well done sir. Or 4. Snow shouldn't stick to stuff, this is steep! And you can find these on my website, givemeyourmoneyyouidiot.com) the arrow broke off!



Toma thought someone should guinea-pig the run for the rest of us because we couldn't see over the first roll and we weren't sure whether it was a cliff or the chute. Toma chose me and as much as I wanted to lay first tracks, I knew Huck wanted the same and I had ruined his run at Double Barrel and owed him as much. After he broke his steep-omoter he laid down one of the nicest runs I have ever seen. He cut right swung left just in time to setup for a narrow passage between a bush and a cliff, after fluidly passing through that gate he banked around a boulder curved off a snow bank and shot down the final pitch. I was so impressed with the run I turned creativity off and followed his line all the way down! Sick bird "Kaw-Kaw"!!!!!



The next trip up consisted of the super stoke that can only be found in the backcountry. "That was sick," "yeah" "true" "sick" "love it" "live for it" "better than crack" "I hear crack is back" "sick" "amazing line" "gnar" "dude, that was sick" "yeah, super sick" …



The next run we decided to step it down a notch and if the steep-omoter was still working it would have come up as a level 2 or there about. This doesn't mean it wasn't fun. Ali and Toma laid down some beautiful tele turns down the center and Huck, Igor and I boosted our confidence by dropping a small cornice with great snow underneath it. Igor made it look classy by adding, his favorite, iron cross! (I love it when he does that!)



That was it for Oakes but we still had to cross over the top and ski down the Monroe Brooke. On our way back up we looked back on what we skied and decided that if we burned down the trees covering the cliff I wanted to hang-glide off we could have an amazing big mountain competition venue (don't worry hippies, we decided that it would be better to keep it for ourselves and use trees as shelter for a base camp for a multi day trip to Oakes). Up and over past the Lake of the Clouds and summit hut I didn't expect much out of our last run but boy o boy (yeah, I wrote boy o boy!) was I wrong.



The snow was great the pitch was level 3 steep and once again we got first tracks! Huge turns, 1 more cliff, a tree laden half-pipe and an easy run out and we were back at the car!



I'd never been to Alaska but we made a full day of it, (climbing about 9000vft and skiing the same) leaving the lot around 6pm, and it was everything I could have imagined!