Been wanting to ski this one for a long time, the first time I ever set eyes on this awesome peak was on my first trip in the eastern sierra 8 years ago. We had a great time and skied some great snow...Here come the photos....
We started at the Convict Lake trailhead, and ran into Mike, Howie and Davey coming out from their tour from rock creek. Check out his post from their trip. It looks like it was amazing!
http://thebackcountry.net/bb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2086#p6283 We spent the first few hours walking on dirt in tennies with everything on our backs. This is my good buddy Jon Rockwood being a bubble back. too much stuff.
Heres Rylan Cordova underneath the bony Mendenhall Couloir on Laurel, pretty cool looking line.
another mendenhall shot...
Anytime I see this peak I think of the video that John Morrison made of him and his buddy Christian skiing it last year. so sick. Check it out for yourselves!
http://vimeo.com/20049993Just after you pass under mendenhall, you get your first peek of the peak. and its beautiful!
Pinner couloir on Laurel looking bony too. probably goes though.
still on dirt...
finally some snow...now we're getting somewhere!
Then the pain and dusty dirt is forgotten when you arrive here. What a great view, i always feel so lucky to be hanging out in places like this!
A little alpenglow recon shooting...
Its always nice to find a good dry spot to camp, it keeps it a little more comfortable and casual. We started hiking in around 1 pm and found this good spot around 6...you could say we didn't haul ass up there.
It took us about 2 hours to skin from camp at Lake Mildred to the base of the couloir, some really slippery frozen crust and beautiful views. Here is Rylan skinning out of camp.
Heres Jon about halfway there, getting the big view.
Regrouping before the final push to the base and transition to booting...
Up to the base of the couloir, the snow was pretty funky, from frozen crust to fully breakable crust. Once we got into the shade of the line, the snow transformed to perfect pow on supported base, so psyched!
about 1/3 of the way up.
Nothing like climbing steep snow with good friends in the California sun! It took us about an hour and a half to climb this bad boy...pretty much perfect conditions for booting.
The boys psyched to drop. We didnt continue up the traversing route to the summit, the snow on it was getting pretty manky and to be honest we were scared to spend much time on the warm snow above all that exposure. The alternate entrance directly above the couloir was pretty thin too, probably could have climbed up, but it would have been pretty tricky to get back down... The lure of perfect safe pow in the couloir was too high for us to do any monkey business up there.
I always forget to shoot a photo from the top of lines like this, but here is one from about halfway down...
A look back at our tracks in the line and the runout. Such fun skiing!
Long way out from here, and we still have to pack up camp....
gotta leave some signatures before we go....
Almost back to camp...
We did a bunch of this before we landed back on the same trail we came in...what a great trip. We started at about 7:30 from camp and made it back to the car around 5 pm. It made for a pretty long day...Can't wait to get back down to the eastside!
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