The Utah Isles
Saturday, February 22, Cole, Tyler, and I went biking at Stansbury Island.
After having a blast in November on the last bike ride of the fall at Antelope Island, we decided to explore another of the Great Salt Lake's desert islands.
We are not sure if we ever found the TH, but we did find a trail. It was straight up the mountain for the first 800'.
After the initial climb the trail settled on an elevation and offered some great technical rock gardens. It also offers these spectacular views of Utah desert - mountain country.
We rode to this point, where the trail just ended? So we turned around and headed back for a ~13 mile out and back. We never found out if we were on the actual bike trail.
Views of the Tooele Valley sandwiched between the Oquirrh and Stansbury Mountains.
Little Pine Couloir
February 23
Brian Cone's first blog authorship
Little
Pine Couloir has big vertical!
Striking
out at what we thought was an acceptably early hour of 6:30 from
Matt’s house, the team rallied up Little Cottonwood Canyon in Matt’s Legacy.
The goal was to ski some south facing carnage, rack up some decent sun and make
the most out of our sunny, sunny Sunday.
About
5 minutes into the car ride, I mentioned to Matt that the Legacy still smelled
like there was gas coming through the air vents. Looking back, Cole appeared to
have passed out. I wasn’t sure if it was due to the gas or staying up late.
I
read our trusty copy of “The Chuting Gallery” – just to verify that we had our
choice well selected among the other south facing steep shots in LCC.
As
we passed the intended target, dawn was bestirring herself and light alpenglow
decked the upper most ridges of the south facing summits. Cole mentioned that
he saw someone skiing down our line. Apparently we weren’t up early enough.
Note to self: if you want first tracks down a couloir on a random Sunday when
it hasn’t snowed significantly in a week, you had better be starting skiing
down prior to 7am.
Luckily,
he was a snowboarder and unable to muster enough game to make it up into the
upper reaches of the little pine couloir! Well – let me rephrase – we talked to
him on his way out and he said “its pretty icy in there, and I didn’t make it
all the way up because I have to be at work in half an hour.” That made us feel
like this guy was pretty alright – even though he was a snowboarder.
The
team booted up the little pine couloir. The going was better than it had been
on previous boots of south facing LCC couloirs by the team – owing to several
reasons:
1
– generally cold temperatures in recent days keeping the snowpack from slushing
up
2
– increased mental fortitude
3
– booting from the beginning..
We
summited in around 2:45 of uphill climbing. I have to give big props
to Matt for putting in the boot for most of the vertical. I struggled enough
hefting my own overweight body up the bootpack which crushed under most steps
in the upper section, leaving a facetted snowy trench where once had been
semi-orderly boot prints.
Little
Pine had some evidence of wet-release over the previous cycle – grapefruit
sized chunder just below the choke point. We would see the same point release
from the skier’s right above the chute before we made our way down that day.
The
view from the top was great. As with every summit on a blue bird day, the
contrast of the snow against sun and tree hemmed mountains was good to see.
The
team descended after hanging out at the summit for around an hour. Cole and
Matt made fun of me for wearing my crampons when I climbed to the summit. I
thought that because I had hefted them up, I should at least make use of them
while flirting about at the top. Prior to making our way down, we spotted
another team making their way up. We watched them from our vantage and were
happy that our start time was not theirs.
The
ski down was fun, slushy and generally pretty safe.
One
of the big takeaways for the day was that we had successfully summited a route
when 2 other parties had not – probably some evidence of our increased skills,
fitness and tenacity.
A
couple of smaller take-aways from the day:
If
it looks like you’ll be booting the entire trip, stow the skins in a place that
you wont lose them and save some weight.
Don’t
always just believe the guys from REI when you buy crampons. Apparently I
bought ones that are for “vertical ice” – whatever, the ice front points look
badass. I could probably replace them with some alpine ones or remove them
altogether and save a few ounces.
Those
yahoos down in the parking lot who are talking about their impending trip to
Chamonix and getting bush-planed onto a glacier in Alaska and how they need a
“base camp manager” can be pretty easily revealed to be full of shit by asking
simple questions… or maybe their life is 100% alpine adventure. Who knows.
