s%*t we should turn around thread

[johnnya]

Thought id share this story and see what you guys have experienced.

our line is the prominant chute to the right in the pic.
Attachment 11743

conditions for the day were listed as moderate, low, low, in the alpine, treeline and below treeline respectively. 11 cm's of fresh, dry rockies snow.

anyways..we approached the moderate slope just before the curtain of the chute and as we were skinning up we heard that noise, say it with me now... woomphf. We discussed and decided that it was a thin, boulder laiden area and probably wasnt representative of our line. Yet even though we felt this was a logical explanation we both still felt apprehensive.
We decided to dig a pit on the curtain just to see how deep it was and if their was any layers of concern in the top meter of the snowpack,,there wasnt any as far as we could tell. Right or wrong we set forth to boot pack up the couloir which is the only feasible access to the upper bowl and the couly itself. About half way up we were stuck in deep, deep snow and making no progress up the thing. A combination of frustration and apprehension from the earlier whoompfing led to our decision to turn around at that point. Afterwards we both felt disapointed for not skiing the line, but we knew the decision was a good one.., i guess.

So whats your peoples aaww shit we need to turn around story? And do you have any suggestions on boot packing up in steep and deep snow?

[nutcase]

A friend and I were trying to hook up blow in mexico and this guy started leading us through an alley - just around the corner- just around the corner. Shit dude we turned around and booked it-

I guess this has nothing to with the slide zone. sorry

[summit]

i hate booting up winter snowpack slide terrain. its difficult and usaully far more dangerous than skiing the same. if its not the spring pack i'm pointing or kicking up, i'd almost always rather take another way up. but sometimes there is no alternate route. then you just have to make your own decisions based on the risk. your danger was moderate. you gave it a try and then changed your mind based on what you felt. doesnt seem like you did anything wrong.

[LeeLau]

Spring skiing conditions down low on the glacier but 1 kms further up it was still winter. Peak is 3060m - we start 1 km further down. At 3030 m the slope steepens so we bootpack. Hit rock and thin snow pack and facets - 60 cms of facets! So 30m from summit we put our skis on and ski back down. So close yet so far

[leroy jenkins]

Just curious, where was this pic taken? You don't have to give away your secret area or anything, just general area.

[johnnya]

Just curious, where was this pic taken? You don't have to give away your secret area or anything, just general area.

Oh its no secret up here at all.. thats bow summit, about 20 minutes north of Lake Louise

[Meadow Skipper]

End of February, New Mexico Sangre de Cristos near Taos, worst drought in 100 years, and we bust our asses to get deep into the hills in a last-ditch slog to get to this north-facing chute:


Oh yeah, looking good...but thin cover and a long cold dry period led us to think we'd better do a little analysis, so we send the AT'er in to stomp around:


...and dig a little:


He finds a softish slab laying over about 6 inches of severe facets:


And this hurt, because it'd been so crappy in the NM SdCs and we'd skinned a long way, and it looked so sweet... But we turned away and skied a mediocre short shot that was southish-facing and stable...with a bonus of breakable crust:


Not much of a consolation prize, but no one in the crew had a good feeling about skiing that (beautiful) chute given the pinché faceted snow layer. We'll go get it when it's sintered up.

[AltaPowderDaze]

was this pic taken the same day you went up? the slide/slough in the foreground may be a clue to stability.

i have a general knowlege of the snowpack as i approach a chute and check it the whole way up. a collapse usually tells me that i don't what to put myself in such a risky position as booting up a couloir. when wallowing in a couloir you should identify the reason you are sinking (facets or unconsolidated?). any slabs or crusts present?

conditions have to be good for me to boot up coulies in the winter. spring and summer i rather enjoy booting them.

[johnnya]

^^^
no this is an older pic taken from biglines.
Last weekend north facing (which our line is) were reported as being pretty stable (for the alberta rockies anyways) and we saw no signs of any avy activity.

a collapse usually tells me that i don't what to put myself in such a risky position as booting up a couloir. when wallowing in a couloir you should identify the reason you are sinking (facets or unconsolidated?). any slabs or crusts present?

.

Thats a great point, we logically "reasoned" the collapse out as being in a boulder feild, but i definetly wont be booting up that thing until things are perfect...lessons learnt anyways. The snow we got stuck in was unconsoldiate snow from sluffing and snow deposit from the night before.

[pointedem]

Meadow Skipper-

that is the worst test slope pit i have ever seen dug.
you are allready exposing yourself to the slope-- not quite a test slope at all.

from what the pictues show-
excuse me if i am mistaken

[Meadow Skipper]

Meadow Skipper-

that is the worst test slope pit i have ever seen dug.
you are allready exposing yourself to the slope-- not quite a test slope at all.

from what the pictues show-
excuse me if i am mistaken

I'm not sure I understand your "not quite a test slope at all" - do you mean it was the worst because the guy was on the slope, or the worst because the spot wasn't representative?

I suppose it's hard to tell from the pictures, but it was at the top of the chute - there wasn't anything significant above him to take him down. The pictures from above were taken from a rock headwall, and the picture from the side was taken from just a few feet below where we would've dropped in to start skiing. The guy was a little enthusiastic about skiing the chute and was ready to go, but we slowed him down and got him to do a ski cut and then stop to dig - I maybe would have been happier if he'd stopped at or above that rock feature that's just above him. But we felt he was just above the point of sketch. While he was digging, we were thinking it would provide better results if here were farther down into the slope, but we didn't have a rope with us for a belay. Turned out it didn't matter because what we found made us decide against the slope.

[pointedem]

it is definally representive of the aspect you are going to ski- you are ON the aspect.

From the photo, it just looked like he was compromising his safety-

It just seems a little loose. If that had been higher avy danger, even where he traversed to dig that pit very well could have resulted in him getting washed out- espically considering ya didnt end up skiing the slope due to your pit results-

It is tricky to determine "the point of sketch" sometimes. Personally, if the conditions were questionable, i prob. would not go dig a pit there.

That being said, sometimes it is impossible to find a test slope and gently getting onto a " maybe sketch, probably not" slope is the only way to find out.

i just thought i looked sketch from the photo-
too bad about the crust.

[PNWbrit]

it is definally representive of the aspect you are going to ski- you are ON the aspect.

From the photo, it just looked like he was compromising his safety-

It just seems a little loose. If that had been higher avy danger, even where he traversed to dig that pit very well could have resulted in him getting washed out- espically considering ya didnt end up skiing the slope due to your pit results-

It is tricky to determine "the point of sketch" sometimes. Personally, if the conditions were questionable, i prob. would not go dig a pit there.

That being said, sometimes it is impossible to find a test slope and gently getting onto a " maybe sketch, probably not" slope is the only way to find out.

i just thought i looked sketch from the photo-
too bad about the crust.

I agree some strange stuff going on here - seems so often that digging a pit just makes it o.k.."we found a layer....decided it was ok...ski one at a time.. ski cut...keeping eyes on... safe zone" - safe travel is safe travel not an excuse to "let's ski it now we're here"

If it comes to the point of putting shovel to snow to make a go no go decision then it's probably already too late to make a good decison?

[Meadow Skipper]

it is definally representive of the aspect you are going to ski- you are ON the aspect.

Yeah, that's the point of doing snow analysis. Doesn't do much good to analyze unrepresentative locations, eh?

From the photo, it just looked like he was compromising his safety-

It just seems a little loose. If that had been higher avy danger, even where he traversed to dig that pit very well could have resulted in him getting washed out- espically considering ya didnt end up skiing the slope due to your pit results-

Well, consider that we didn't know what the conditions were until we dug the pit. The top foot and a half was beautiful - it would have been great to ski. The location was a long slog from the trailhead and we had to dig to see what underlay the surface layer. If we hadn't dug the pit, we wouldn't have found the facets and we'd have probably skied it.

It is tricky to determine "the point of sketch" sometimes. Personally, if the conditions were questionable, i prob. would not go dig a pit there.

Again, sometimes (like this time) you can't tell if the conditions are questionable until you dig. Do you just stay home until spring? And even then, how do you 'know'?

That being said, sometimes it is impossible to find a test slope and gently getting onto a " maybe sketch, probably not" slope is the only way to find out.

Yep.

I agree some strange stuff going on here - seems so often that digging a pit just makes it o.k.."we found a layer....decided it was ok...ski one at a time.. ski cut...keeping eyes on... safe zone" - safe travel is safe travel not an excuse to "let's ski it now we're here"

Well, that certainly wasn't the case here, was it? We dug, we bailed. No excuses.

If it comes to the point of putting shovel to snow to make a go no go decision then it's probably already too late to make a good decison?

See above. You can't always know what the conditions are just from looking at it or knowing roughly what the weather's been like. That's why pit analysis was developed, right?

[pointedem]

not trying to come off as insulting or anything like that

i usually try to find a test slope where the consequences of collaspe are nil.

That was the only thing that I was like "woah, you wouldn't catch me doing that" in yer analysis.

other then that- nice trip!

[smitchell333]

The hardest decisions are those that you have to make after a long ski in and close to the objective.

"i can see the summit right there", "its just another 20 minutes"

One turn around story that comes to mind:

Spring skiing on Mt Lassen we skinned up from the valley bottom where temps had been quite cold - such that the snowpack was frozen hard as a rock. We leisurely toured up the NE slopes below treeline - thinking that if anything we'd be early for the corn as down low it was going to take some hours of sun to warm it.

Well about 1000' feet from the summit on the last face we suddenly started to occassionaly post hole. At first we wrote it off as isolated pockets - maybe some barely covered rocks. At 500' to go it started to happen more, at 250' it happened almost every step. Probing and digging revealed the problem to be that only the top 6-7" had frozen and the higher we got the thinner the crust and the deeper the moist snow underneath - 30+" deep.

Later we deduced that there had been a temperature inversion with temps colder in the valley than up high on the mountain. That and the tendency of easterly aspect to absorb lots of heat with early sunhit and melting throughout the day.

So we had to throw in the towel - despite being only a couple hundred vertical from the summit.

[Kellie]

This is a great thread . . . I like to hear how others go about making decisions and the discussion of choices is a good one.

I was up at the Lane Hut near Hatcher Pass in January - 4 mile skin in to a hut. We skied Saturday and had to climb a boulder field that was filled in, but certainly not deep. We decided to dig and found good consolidated snow with 6" of sugar on top. Since the questionable snow wasn't buried, we went up it and had a great afternoon of skiing. We did discuss the fact, however, that after one snowfall this place would be caput. It was a beautiful sunny day and was supposed to remain that way.

2am I wake up to go to the bathroom . . . 4-5" of new on the ground. By 10ish when we left, there was about 10-12" of new and snowing hard. It was sooo sad because everything skiable was red light terrain. We decided to dig another pit to reassess just in case, and had an interesting discussion about human factors. The new snow wasn't a cohesive slab (yet), but thoughts of increasing danger throughout the day were more than I could stomach. We made 4 turns through some of the deepest lightest snow I've skied in awhile, and then slogged to the car. It's the first time I'd really walked away from something, especially after that much effort.

The wierd thing is that in many ways I felt guilty about the decision, like I was letting my partner down, or not being core, or whatever. I didn't question the choice: it wasn't within my risk tolerance and I certainly wasn't in the mood to die. My partner said that if he was alone, he probably would have skied it (he skies alone a lot), but was okay walking away from it. I'm still not sure if he really agrees we should have.

Anyhow, this is sorta turning into a stream-of-consciousness rant, but it's interesting stuff to think about and reflect on . . .

It is really interesting to look back on it though.

[johnnya]

The wierd thing is that in many ways I felt guilty about the decision, like I was letting my partner down, or not being core, or whatever. I didn't question the choice: it wasn't within my risk tolerance and I certainly wasn't in the mood to die. My partner said that if he was alone, he probably would have skied it (he skies alone a lot), but was okay walking away from it. I'm still not sure if he really agrees we should have.

Anyhow, this is sorta turning into a stream-of-consciousness rant, but it's interesting stuff to think about and reflect on . . .

It is really interesting to look back on it though.

Yeah, i felt the same way (see above), but thats the good thing about communication and ditching your ego. There will always be great days, especially where you are.

---Maybe AKPM should read this thread

[LeeLau]

BUMP as this seems topical these days.

We tried to go to a new area in the Duffy lake area N of Whistler this Sunday.

As we approached the ridge - the trees cleared and the snow became a bit stiff from windslab.

One section needed to be bootpacked. As soon as skis were off, foot pen would be through the thick crusty windslab and into facets around a rocky thin snowpack.

Wallowing through facets isn't fun but we were close to the ridgeline. But daylight was getting short.

With the thought that thin rocky faceted snowpacks have already killed a few people this year, we booked back down the slope and skied our skintrack back through thick tight trees to make a very unsatisfactory tour.

that ridge and the runs off it ain't going anywhere ... another time perhaps.