you dog! i had a spot booked at TPR this weekend but got skunked due to a sick kid. would've been nice to ski those lines with you. nice pics.

Sunday May 10, 2009
For my last day of the season I thought I would keep it short and sweet and tick off a nice aesthetic line, the Chute Out.
As I was heading back down the road from skiing White Mtn on Saturday, I noticed three skiers climbing up the chute at the ripe time of 2:30pm. Hmmm, seemed kind of questionable to me. I know the chute only gets afternoon sun, but still -- if anything, they must be leaving a nice bootpack behind. Let's just hope they didn't mash up the chute proper on the way down.

Here's an early afternoon shot of the bowl and the line in full sun:


And here's a close-up from about 10am.


The sun doesn't hit the main part of the chute until noon. I timed it so that I was headed up it while the climber's left side was still mostly shade, which provided some relief from the pounding sun and better climbing conditions.

approaching the base of the couloir:


the thing about the ellery bowl is its deceptive scale and perspective. It looks so compact and small, but it's pretty freaking large. You think, "it'll take me 10 minutes to make it to that rock," and then 20 minutes later you're still halfway there but you look back and the cars on the road look like specks.

climbing up the couloir was basically simple and straightforward, given the mostly well established bootpack from the previous day, though the sharp things on my feet and the pointy metal thingee in my hand were great aids and always reassuring.

Topped out around 12:30. Kickin' it on the plateau, waiting a few more minutes for the sun to give the chute that perfect kiss:


Dropped in at 1:00. The turns down were sierra springtime steep skiing perfection. Thumbs up to a fun line and good season:

Nice!

I think in the past 5 days or so, probably every steep line around there has gotten skiied... multiple times. :) Coverage up high is great, way better than I expected, and better than this time last year. We rode Solstice and Chute Out/Banana on Sat. We were drinking beers by 1:30. Saw those guys you mentioned and was thinking the same thing. Found out later that I knew one of the guys randomly. Apparently they had never done the chute before, so they wanted to climb up it... but yeah, a bit late in the day. Snow conditions probably OK but I'd be worried about cornices. There are some huge ones up there right now.

Speaking of which, when we had just started skinning up towards Ellery bowl on Sun at about 9 AM, a rock or something fell off the cliffs lookers right of Poop chute, and sent down a bunch of frozen snow bowling balls, some the size of a torso. We kept thinking they would stop, but noooo they kept bouncing all the way down, through us, to the rocks. It was surreal, like human Frogger. Those things were rock hard too. Fortunately nobody took a hit. So be on the lookout, those things are unstable now and can fall at any time.

Oh, BTW if when you were looking at those guys climb Chute Out on Sat, you happened to see someone coming down 120 on a longboard sandwiched between two cars... that was us. :) Granjero rode that thing all the way to the Mo-mart!



I posted a few more pics here on sb.com, hope to get the rest up soon.

My only regret is that I didn't get to witness Glen Poulsen's bday party Dunderberg->Green Creek run apparently involving a group of 50+, and some naked skiing. Some of that group showed up at Powerhouse on Sunday (wearing clothes), we were surprised to see about 10 people pop out of the woods right behind us at the bottom.