Last year Sean told me about this line but I never thought much of it because it was not filled in at the time. Sean called it the butt crack because it goes right down the north side of Battle mountain and you look right at it as you go threw Minturn. According to previous reports though I think people have called it the Pipeline couloir. I saw reports on 14ers, teton, and a video of people skiing this on YouTube. Are group was a little confused with the beta, this might help clear up the beta problems. We parked at the cemetery in Minturn and skinned the railroad tracks into the two elk drainage. We then found a old road cut on the north side of battle mountain and up we went, it was a quick up, pretty steep. The top of the couloir sits around 9,900, you don't need to take the road all the way to the top. You head south (left) off of the road and pop out right on top of the couloir. We didn't know how to enter the couloir so we kept heading south and ended up skiing some trees down into the couloir. I don't think this is the proper way to get into it, there might be a repel into the top or a route we didn't see.
Once we got into the the couloir we started to make a plan. The snow felt and look pretty solid, had a nice base to it and a pretty consistent layer threw the middle. We did have to worry about the top 4 inches of knew snow on top of the dust layer thought. The new snow had not bonded well with the dust, as you skied you would get a good amount of sluff coming with you. Nothing was propagating or shooting cracks, so the name of the game was sluff management. Knowing this we decided to leap frog down to the first belay station, brain had the rope so he took off first! He set up his 70mm rope to the tree that has two pieces of webbing / rope on it, two non locking carabiner's and one locking carabiner. Matt was the first to repel because he had the other rope for the second repel. Matt made the call to repel with skis on, Brian was next. When Brian got to Matt they decided that you could jump the 6 ft ice fall, Brian went for it. Eggelton was up next, he repelled the first ice fall and followed Brians track off the 2nd ice fall. I got on the rope last and repelled down to Matt. Matt jumped the ice fall while I pulled and coiled the rope, I jumped the ice fall and we started to eye up the next ice fall.
(Picture above is Eggelton in the orange pants below the second ice fall and Matt and I in between the first and second ice fall. Left picture is the third ice fall, ledges are on lookers left but you cant see them in the picture) Brian was all about the huck fest so he made the call to jump the last ice fall, no problem Matt fallowed his route. |
Eggelton and I where not feeling it, we traversed to skiers right and skied a series of ledges down and around the last ice fall. We enjoyed skiing the gully right back down to the road. We took are skis off, crossed the road, skied down to the railroad tracks, and started the 30 min skate / push back to the cemetery.