On April 12th, my good friend and regular climbing partner Paul Kaster flew in to Manchester from Denver for some good ol' ski mountaineering on Mt. Washington. We're in the process of training for a ski trip up the Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier, and we thought spring conditions on the Rockpile would be a good approximation to the type of snow conditions we'd find on Emmons in July. From Paul's perspective, it does seem a little silly to fly to New Hampshire from Colorado for backcountry skiing, but he'd never experienced Mt. Washington in her winter coat before, so it was fun all the same.
I picked him up in Manchester on Saturday and we grabbed a motel room in North Conway on Saturday night. The forecast for Sunday was for a fair amount of unknown precipitation, and we figured the mountain would be fairly empty. Sunday morning came and we got a decent breakfast at the Blueberry Muffin in North Conway and then drove up toward Pinkham Notch. It started sprinkling along the way, but when we arrived in Pinkham it was a full on snowstorm. The snow was heavy and wet, but still better than rain. There wasn't much point in dawdling on the Tuckerman Ravine Trail, so we skinned up quickly and reached Hojo's in a little over 2 hours.
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| Skinning up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail in wet snow |
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| Camp for the night |
We set up camp on one of the tent sites outside Hojo's. Interestingly, this hour or so at camp around noon on Saturday was the coldest we were all trip. The combination of being wet and not moving made us pretty chilly, so once camp was set up we ate some food and then decided to get moving again. We skinned up into the bowl of the ravine proper and had a few good runs down the Center Headwall before heading back down the Little Headwall toward Hojo's and Hillman's Highway.
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| Paul skiing out of Tuckerman Ravine proper and toward the Little Headwall |
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| Negotiating the Little Headwall |
After returning to Hojo's, we donned skins again and headed for Hillman's Highway. We reached the base, and Paul's hip was bothering him a bit so I continued up Hillman's solo. I didn't want to spend too much time up there, so I stopped and switched to skis at the turn off for the lower Duchess snowfields and skied those back to Paul. We returned to camp and had some dinner and then dozed and slept for almost 10 hours.
The next morning was significantly warmer than the previous. We awoke to sun and clear skies, and warm temps. Our plan was to skin to Huntington Ravine and climb Pinnacle Gully, then skin across the Alpine Garden and descend Right Gully into Tuckerman. The warm weather overnight caused us to lose a tremendous amount of snowpack up on the mountain, however. We figured almost 9 inches of snow melted overnight.
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| Paul skinning to Huntington Ravine |
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| Skinning up the Fan toward Pinnacle Gully |
I set a steep switchbacking skintrack up the Fan toward the base of Pinnacle Gully. I was worried that the rapidly softening snow would be terrible for booting, so I was hoping to make it as high as possible on our skis before switching to crampons. Eventually I reached a rock and decided it was too steep for skins anymore. I switched to crampons and waited for Paul, who was having a little trouble on the skin track.
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| Switched to crampons and waiting for my skins to dry (they get heavy when wet) |
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| Paul booting it toward me in the softening snow |
Thankfully, the bootpack leading toward Pinnacle and Central Gullies was still fairly firm. We booted the rest of the way toward Pinnacle Gully and finally got our first look at the ice. It sucked. Well, the ice actually looked pretty good, but there was a wall to wall waterfall rushing down the gully. Pretty much impossible to climb. Thankfully we had our skis, and the snow conditions on the Fan were mighty inviting. We donned our skis and made some awesome corny turns down the Fan and back down the Huntington Ravine trail.
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| Charging up the bootpack toward Pinnacle Gully |
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| You can't see in this picture, but it was gushing water wall to wall |
Nice turns down the Fan
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| Nice turns down the Huntington Ravine Trail with Boot Spur in the background |
We reached the Tuckerman Ravine Trail and switched back to skins. We were feeling pretty good about our ski down the Fan, and we decided it was time to call it a weekend. We still had to ski ~ 2000' back down the Sherburne Trail to Pinkham Notch with overnight packs, so we decided to save our legs and get to it. We packed up camp and found great snow conditions on the Sherburne all the way back to Pinkham.
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| Last few turns down the Sherburne to the parking lot |
All and all, it was an excellent trip. We had lots of fun, and I got to ski the Fan, which I've often wanted to do but never gotten the opportunity. It sucks that Pinnacle was out of condition, but there's always next season!
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| Post trip madness in the gear room! |
