Spring Low, Winter High / by Dani Perrot

A few weeks ago, things were startttttting to looking spring-ish, so we headed for the IPW and RMNP to check things out. 

SATURDAY: BLUE LAKE DRAINAGE

We planned to bike to ski Curvaceous Couloir on Paiute, but we had to have a few change-of-plans. First off, we were only able to bike about 100 yards from the car when we realized the road was completely snow-covered. Like...feet of snow. No biking. Skinning it is! So that added an extra four miles each way of flat skinning. Luckily we're pretty speedy, so we didn't lose much time, mostly just energy.

When we got to Brainard, we could see Curvaceous was not in (winds had scoured the middle section down to the talus). Instead, we settled for the snowfield just to the looker's left of Curvaceous. I think just slightly less vert, and a little steeper. WAHOO! Beer and pizza at Crosscut in Ned to recover, and then dinner, Catan, and a sleepover at K&K's afterward. A great day, and a good stoke-builder for skiing something steep-ish again the next day.

SUNDAY: FLATTOP

After reading the avy bulletin, south-facing slopes did not sound promising with such a short and minimal overnight freeze. So we ruled out Corral Couloir in the Park and decided we'd try for Tyndall Glacier (again...we've tried a few other times in March too). Headed up Flattop, and about 1/2 mile from the car I realized: no helmet. Damn. Oh well?

When we got to treeline, it was blowing pretty good. We switched to booting with our skis on our pack since it was basically just sastrugi mixed into talus....not ideal for high-wind conditions, but we slogged through and got to the little protected spot just above Corral and below the Flattop "summit" within 2 hrs of leaving the car. Nice, except we needed to wait about an hour and a half before anything would be soft-ish. So wait we did...and the winds got more intense...and we waited...(using the bathroom was an...interesting...experience)...and finally it was 11:15 and we decided to head up toward Tyndall Glacier. We considered skiing Corral since it was looking pretty good and definitely more protected...but one helmet between two human brains just won't work, so up into more wind we went. 

Pretty quickly, it was obvious we may not be skiing Tyndall. Scratch that: we  would definitely not  be skiing Tyndall. Winds were howling a consistent ~60 mph. Combine that with skis (i.e. sails) on our backs and it was 30 minutes to go 1/4 mile. We got to the saddle where you would drop in, and it was impossible to stand. It was probably blowing about 75 MPH. We decided it would not be safe for us to put skis on. The drop in is around 45-50 º, and we weren't psyched on getting launched over the lip. So sad times: had to turn around and hike back down in the wind for a bit until we could get to some snow. Luckily, Banana Bowls was pretty decent skiing. Still, it was a bit of a bummer. We haven't been able to ski Tyndall because of high winds a few times now. C'est la vie!