The Tetons poke above the clouds yesterday morning.
Click photos for larger image.
Conditions have been pretty stellar here in the Tetons the past few days. With fresh snow every morning and the sun popping out, things have been great for ski touring. Over the past couple days however, I’ve had a mixed bag of high speed powder skiing on Wimpys with epic snow, combined with windshield wiper survival turns down a sustrugi filled West Hourglass Couloir on Nez Perce. (Pretty much the opposite of this trip.) It was so wind hammered in the Hourglass that the boot prints from the previous party (not sure how many days ago) stuck up 2 feet out of the snow. It looked like 2-3 feet (or more) of snow had been ripped off the slope by the wind. I call these type of tracks, “negative tracks”, since they are the opposite of what they should be. Heinous skiing for sure.
The Middle Teton today…Ansel Adams style.
damn NW winds….
Anyone can ski powder. Gotta love heinous skiing.
Kinda crazy to think of the Hourglass in that conditions after it took me almost 2 hours of wallowing in waist deep snow to get up that thing a few weeks ago. Your skiing may have sucked but I bet the trip up was cruiser. Silver lining?
holy synovial fluid batman…that looked heinous. all thoses rocks floating free in the snowpack reminds me of Big Sky.
[…] it makes your teeth rattle. – 1:42…if you look hard, you can see an old wind scoured “negative bootpack†going up the couloir on the right. – 2:00…it’s pretty wild how the wind can shape the snow […]
be sure to check out the video. 🙂
http://tetonat.staging.wpengine.com/2011/01/27/nez-perce-sustrugi/