Day 7 - 11/29/10

[Sam Piper, etching his signature into Toledo Bowl]

“SOME OF THE BEST early season powder ever!”   That’s how Brad described today’s five percent powder that piled up on the central Wasatch over the late weekend.  Right he was.

We climbed Toledo Bowl, moving quickly up a firm skin track tromped in by some Dawn Patrollers.  At the ridgeline, we were finally able to stand upright without being clobbered by the high winds that have characterized November skiing this year.  With a lot of delicious options beckoning on all aspects, we decided on the thousand-foot Holy Toledo chute.  The entry was wind-scoured and cross-loaded.  But once down into the choke-point of the chute, the snow got lighter and more consistent, skiing out for the best run of the season.  (KSL reports that this is the third wettest November in recorded history.)

[preparing to drop into Holy Toledo]

From the basin, we watched two, then four other skiers scallop their tracks down from the Toledo ridge.  We were joined at the basin by Sam and Kyle, ski patrollers from The Canyons.  In the next group, one of the women said “I know you” and I realized it was Caroline George, a rockstar mixed ice climber (http://www.carolinegeorge.com) who was skiing with her husband, Adam.  We met last year at the Ouray Ice Climbing Fest.  But we won’t see her at the 2011 Fest.  She’s off to climb in Antarctica, obviously getting a little acclimatization, given the single-digit temperatures.

Mid-day, we skied a largely passed-over chute on Benson Ridge and made a note of the entry.  Then the trip home reinforced one of the reasons that I love winter backcountry exploring.  People tend to regard the mountains as a uniform white massif, a single organism.  But I’ve personally learned, exploring mountains step by step, that on any day you might traverse dozens of microclimates: a pocket of downy powder, a spine of scaly ice, followed by a sun-exposed swamp of mush, and then a sub-zero gulch.  And this was true as we skied down Cardiff Bowl into deeper, lusher snow, whooping our way down to the highway.

Day's Vertical: 3,600.  Season to Date: 24,200.