Promise Unfulfilled
On our second day in Golden, John, Chris, and I had a seemingly great forecast – a few inches of fresh snow followed by cold temperatures and sunny skies. We linked up with Doug, who was living in Golden at the time, to do some touring. With cold temperatures, we figured that it would be our best opportunity to ski south facing powder, so we hoped to pair Mount Rogers with Lone Pine Couloir, a steep south facing couloir right above the highway.
It was a glorious bluebird morning. There was one other group in the Hermit lot, headed for Swiss Peak.
The Hermit approach to the Swiss Glacier is relatively long and complex. After breaking out of a forest where someone had inexplicably down booted the entire skin track, we broke out into the sunshine, revealing the complex post glacial terrain and high peaks above us. From the car to Mount Rogers is over 6,000 ft of relief!
There is a considerable amount of down skinning to get over to the Swiss Glacier, but the light powder and beautiful views got us very stoked. However, there was already starting to be some puffy clouds forming around the summits…
At the base of the Swiss Glacier, we broke off left from the existing skin track to ascend Mount Rogers. The wide fan gradually steepened and narrowed. The snow also became a bit funky, with a 2 inch wind crust on top. When it started to crack around our kick turns, I decided to start booting to manage the risk better.
The boot up to the summit ridge was a deep wallow, but we managed. From there, we could mostly skin to the true summit, which happened to be mostly out of the clouds at the moment. It was cold and storm clouds were pushing in, so we flipped quickly and started our ski down.
Doug skied first over the 40 degree roll. As I followed, I saw Doug lying at the bottom of the run, carried by a small avalanche! He had skied a bit too aggressively and triggered the shallow 2-4 inch wind slab we had noted on the way up. He was unhurt, so we gathered his skis and poles and brought them down to him. Fortunately, the run out was very chill, so the slide wasn’t consequential, but it was still a good wake up call.
After regrouping, we continued along the long ridge towards Lone Pine Couloir to assess conditions. But when we got towards the drop in, our incident on Mount Rogers and the strong winds convinced us to bail on another steep line and instead take the standard Hermit slide path descent back to the car. A helicopter whizzed over us, and we would later find out that one of the four members headed for Swiss Peak unfortunately fell two thousand feet to his death on the steep north face. This was definitely a day where it felt like the mountains were telling us to take it easy.
The upper few thousand feet of the Hermit Slide Path was pretty good, but below about 6500 ft was a mess of massive avalanche debris from the recent atmospheric river, breakable crust, and sloppy forest.
The day started very promising, but the unexpected clouds and slightly sketchy stability definitely made the day feel a little disappointing. However, that is part of the game in a new zone, especially with the unstable spring weather in these mountains. We still got to bag the highest peak above Rogers Pass and see some incredible views!