With the bighorn sheep closures going into effect on December 15th in Grand Teton National Park, it’s always fun to explore the slopes of the peaks that you don’t get to ski for most of the winter. Yesterday, I got out with Reed to ski the East Face of Tukuarika Peak, which is just shy of 11K’ and sits on the north side of Open Canyon behind Prospectors Mountain. Tukuarika is a Shoshone name for the Sheepeater Indians that frequented the Tetons before white man moved in.
We got a pre-sunrise start from the Death Canyon summer trailhead and followed wolf tracks down to Phelps Lake…and up into Open Canyon. There was just enough snow on the ground to skin most of the way and we tried to keep moving, knowing the trip would be anywhere from 12-15 miles round trip, with an unknown amount of deadfall dodging. It felt great to be in the mountains once we where higher up and there was more of a snowpack. We booted the final 1,500′ to the summit, through varying depths of low density powder and sugar snow. The wind was howling and it was cold, so we didn’t linger. A small soft-slab released as we were down-climbing off the ridge, looking for protection from the wind. The skiing was great, but rocks hiding just below the surface kept the speed down. Mister Suunto logged the tour at 5,900 total vert and a time of 8:50 CTC. Hope you like the pics!
i saw your van at the trailhead before and after we skied albright.i guessed you were in open canyon. i’ve been out of town alot lately, co tonight. well catch up sometime.
Good guess Travo. I bet Albright was good…up high at least.
I like the new feature of having all of the photos in a slide show format, but is there a way to add manual controls so you can stop on a specific picture?
Not so much with this .gif format Jerimy. But doable when created in video format.
Sweet Teton TR! Glad to see the range is starting to get snowy and you’re out there getting after it again. It’s a long dry summer. I even submitted a Guest TR but what I really come here for is this kind of hardcore Teton pron. 🙂
Hey, I don’t know what technical limitations you’re working with or not, but using some easy plug-and-play JavaScript libraries you can create a slideshow with controls without making an actual “movie”. Fast loading too. Fade transitions, etc. You probably already know about these, but just in case you didn’t, the first example that comes to mind is:
http://malsup.com/jquery/cycle/
There are others though. Look through the demos. You can add next/prev/start/pause buttons and you can use JPEGs so the pics aren’t as grainy as GIFs and are smaller too. It’s all copy/paste, super easy once you read to docs.
Cheers!
Thanks for the info Evan. I’ll look into it.