How to make Main safe to ski step by step ...
... without the luxury of hand charges.
1. Take note from the day before that Dogleg and Little slid naturally about half way through our 16" storm, but Main hasn't.
2. Head up to Alta after work.
3. Skin/boot up to Main Chute in stellar skinning conditions down low and horrendous booting for the last 1/4 of the way in friggin' howling SW winds.
4. Yell in pain at the top as you de-thaw your fingertips inside your coat.
5. Look down the gut of her and see obvious windslab/pillows on the right side of her just waiting for a trigger. Go look at Little and she looks even more windloaded.
6. Gear up and ski cut the very top NE face of her. Make note of shooting cracks. Think to self, maybe not such a good idea - but cracks are not propagating very far and what snow is running isn't running very far.
7. Kick turn and ski cut the middle a few feet under the cornice. Same results. Come on you biatch, I know you wanna go - where's your G spot.
8. One more kick turn back to right and give a hard ski cut towards mega wind slab/pillow on the right side - right where she rolls over to about 45 degs.
9. CRACK!!! There she goes like a friggin freight train!!! I just about shat my pants. I knew I could get her to go and knew pretty close where I had to touch her just right - but didn't expect her to run so fast. She ran all the way to Ballroom Traverse - right down the gut. As one might think she went on the crust layer beneath our 16" of luv with about a foot crown line. Fracture line propagated out to about the middle of the chute - pretty much the extents of the wind loading.
10. Traverse back left to non-wind loaded side and take my faceshots like a man all the way to the bottom. Best conditions I've ever had in Main - hands down. BTW, I passed up some very tempting High Shoulder luv on the way too.
11. Ski back to truck in a nuking storm and thank the Lord I am safe.
Moral of the story (not to preach to choir - but just wanna remind) be careful out there boys and girls - even in closed resorts. Keep that AV nose sniffing; their out there.
Our winter here is far from over. As Treskow said in his thread it is friggin nuking up LCC. Wish I could be at the Birdy, Bird tomorrow morn (there BumZ and Frizzo I admitted it) cause it will be sicky, sick with the 6-8" that will surely fall tonight plus a howling SW wind Silver Fox, Hanging Bowl and the Cirque will be off da hook.
Utards, go git sum - come August you're gonna wish you had. :D
