More Powder on Wimpys

Randosteve breaks off a cornice on top of Wimpys on Saturday.

After the blizzard on Friday and with the 14” of new snow in the mountains on Saturday, Reed and I braved the high avalanche danger and ventured to Wimpy’s for a day of breaking trail though thigh deep wind drifts. The track was completely filled in from the trailhead with 6-10′ of fresh snow and what normally is a two hour hike to the 10,000 Wimpy’s highpoint, turned out to be over four.

As we passed the summer trailhead, we both couldn’t help but notice how snow covered everything was. The ‘no parking’ sign, which is normally at eye level, was nearly completely buried and the trailhead information sign wasn’t too far behind. A slight break in the weather allowed the suns rays to warm us up quickly. With all the snow packed in the trees from the high winds, the visuals seemed to be in black and white as we made our way up the mountain. It was kind of weird.

The clearing skies didn’t last long and it wasn’t long until the wind was blowing again and we had our jackets back on. Breaking trial was becoming a bear too! The Verdicts didn’t seem to be wide enough and were hovering below the surface, forcing whoever was breaking trail to really lift their skis up and out of the snow before moving them forward. A great hip flexor workout, but I was really wishing for a pair of those Megawatts to keep me afloat. Gotta work on getting me a pair of those things.

In the upper bowl we searched for areas in the trees where the snow might not be as deep. We took two breaks on the way to the top and refueled on ProBars and hot chocolate. Occasionally we would run into a drift that was literally up to our hips once we had plowed our way through. The wind was pretty mellow which was nice, but you could see that many of the cornices in the area had grown in sized from the previous gusts. I took a moment to kick one off while Reeders snapped a photo.

After ripping the skins we headed for the gut-line. A couple pics to come!