I singed onto my Facebook two days ago and saw that my friend Justin had shredded the north couloir of Pacific in epic conditions. Normally if I saw that some one else had just shredded a line I would want to go somewhere else but this was North Couloir on Pacific. I have grown up looking at this Peak my hole life. I saw the couloir three years ago for the first time and I told myself "I have to ski that one day." I was able to messaged Justin and get the scoop on the snow pack. I called up my buddies Peter and Nick and asked if they wanted to go, BOYA they where in! Since Peter was driving all the way from Durango and Nick from Boulder I looked into beefing up the day with another ski descent of Crystals north face, definitely worth it!
Are first plan we made was to leave the Mayflower Gulch trail head at 7 a.m. but nick thought that that was to late, we bumped the start time back to 6 a.m. When you have hippie friends you should always plan to be a hour late, I got to the trail head at 6 a.m. and they where 45 minutes late! O well nothing I could do, we got going at 6:45 a.m. We sent it into the Humbug drainage and then threw on the weapons. We kicked steps straight up the south west face and summited at 945. Looking into the line was so epic! THE PICTURS DONT DO JUSTICE AT ALL! This is a 55-60 degree couloir for about 1,000 feet, our according to mountain project an ice climb in the spring! |
After an awesome ski we where at the bass of crystal and started to gear up for another climb. We kicked steps about half way up Crystals south face and then switched to skins because it flattens out and the snow was starting to get warm. We don't know how long it took to get up crystal but we topped out just before noon. The skiing off of the top of Crystal is awesome big open face skiing into some tight chokes. We had no beta on this route so we took it nice and slow and finally found that the fourth gully on skiers left is the only one that went top to bottom, this year. The choke was a little rocky but it made for a fun challenge! We then skied the drainage all the way back to highway 91. We were to tired to walk the old railroad grade back to the highway, we braved a river crossing, climb up the snow bank to the road, and walked the highway back to are car we left at the bottom of the Fremont grade. This is a really awesome way to get two epic ski descents in one day! 5,000 vert of skiing, 4,000 vert of hiking, and only 8 miles round trip!