Skiing Colossal and Granite Glacier Photo Gallery

The following day, our second full day at the Fairy Meadows Hut, we awoke to greybird skies. The plan was to do a long ski tour across multiple glaciers and out to Sir William. Being on a glacier is not very pleasant in a whiteout and/or flat light, but we had hopes that the clouds would burn off and after hemming and hawing for a while in the morning, we set out towards Granite Glacier and Sir William anyway. The slow start put us back a bit…time wise, and after making our way through the glacier, we decided that just skiing Colossal would be more in tune with the day and the weather.

After skinning to the base of Colossal’s steep east face, we booted upward towards the summit. The snow was still in good shape, despite its eastern exposure and Reed broke trail all the way to the top, earning himself first tracks on the descent. One at a time, we skied the face, which had two distinct rollovers that pushed the slope towards 50 degrees. Today, we were a group of five and two in the party waited at the bottom…and we waited for them to lap the face once we were done. Safety first!

After skiing Colossal, we continued down a long ramp on the left flank of the glacier that brought us down to its toe and a highly crevassed area. The turns seemed to go on forever and we were all on cloud nine when we regrouped on the flats. As we skinned back towards the hut and over multiple moraines, I couldn’t keep my eye off a triangular shaped snowfield the came off a sub peak of Sentinel and sat in the middle of the entire Fairy Meadows zone. I vowed to leave my mark later in the week.