Well today was a tough day mentally and physically. Henry had the day off and we wanted to ski something in the gore. We started to look at weather and temperatures, none of it looked promising, rain, snow, and barely freezing. We knew it was going freeze around 10,000 feet so we had to go deep and high. My friend nick had showed me this line on a TGR forum, a guy skied this line in May 2008. We thought "great plenty of snow only worry will be if it freezes". We started at 6:30 in shoes, hiked for an hour, then switched to skins. We lost the summer trail but if you hug the east side of the basin it is pretty smooth going (gore standers, good bush whack for other standers). We noticed as we hiked in that the snow was very variable and we would have to really play it safe. We skinned for another hour and a half and finally got the base of the line! After skinning in the rain, snow and fog we looked up and saw that the hole line had slid, it was full of chucks of snow the size of a fiat 500's. Good thing we didn't set off the avalanche but heart breaking that we could not ski it. About half way up the line it does a dog leg, we decided to kick steps up to the dog leg and see if we could ski the upper part. No need to worry about bad snow, it was rock hard. Once we got the the dog leg more bad news, there was debris all the way to the top of the line.
Well as much as I wanted to bag this line, skiing down bowling balls for 2,000 vertical feet was not really what I or Henry wanted to do. We geared up, side slipped down the side of the couloir to the bottom and had 8 turns down the apron. We saw a little gully that led to the west side of the valley and decided to go explore. We looked down the gully and saw that it ended up in a water fall and opted to skip it and stay dry. We worked are way around it and found are self's on the west side of the valley, WRONG SIDE. Stay to the east side, the west is full of creeks and hills. After an hour of hiking around the west side of the valley we ran out of snow and got ready for the walk out. Five hours later we were back at the car, 8 miles, 3,500 vertical, and 8 turns, HELL OF A DAY!!!! Good thing I love adventures and love having the blessing of being in the mountains or today could have been a bust!