Route below with day 1 in orange, day 2 in blue:
This weekend was my first time skiing in the eastern sierra as we usually stick to the close Tahoe, but with good roads and minimal traffic on said roads, it seems like the perfect time of year to go.
We left Oakland at around 6:30 on Friday night, and arrived at our "campsite" on buckeye road just outside Bridgeport at 11:30. We were up again at 6:30 and finished the short drive to Annett's Mono Village. It was the opening day of the fishing season, and the Trump enthusiasts were out in force to get at it. We were on the trail by 8, and across the river by 10. From the other side of the river we were able to ski up the canyon into where we would be camping.
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| Matt walking in |
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| A little snow, but not worth throwing the skis on |
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| View into little slide canyon after popping out of the trees |
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| Kettle Peak. The speck of black in the coulior is a person... the coulior is way larger than it appears in the photo |
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| View of the Hulk from our campsite. We ended up in one of the summer camp sites, it was probably the only spot with flat sandy ground not covered in snow |
After we setup our tent and threw all of our camp gear into the tent, we headed up to do the very awesome looking eft Hulk coulior. Matt ended up way ahead, and after we watched Matt struggle to ski coming down... dragging his ice axe while side slipping... we decided to pull off about 1/3-1/2 way up and switch to skis. Good choice. It took a bit of slide slipping from where we transitioned, but we were able to ski most of the way out.
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| Looking into left hulk coulior |
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| Caitlin skiing closer the bottom, where it was a bit less icy |
We were wanting to ski some more after a bit of a break at camp, but we all ended up napping and reading for a bit and the enthusiasm died down. We hung out some more and made dinner and headed off to bed.
It was not a fun night in the tent. The wind slowly picked up from the evening to around 2am. It was a complete struggle to sleep with the tent very loudly flapping around, and the roof flexing down so much that it was hitting me in the hip. Eventually the fly ripped off one corner and ended up wrapped around our tent so we were able to get some sleep. It was a very cold (but quieter) night after this, I ended up wearing my merino baselayers + puffy jacket + gore tex hardshells while in my bag. In the morning, it was still crazy windy, and we more or less had no enthusiasm left to ski. I was also very worried what to do with our camp supplies, as anything which wasn't a rock was flying away. We skied and walked back out to the car at this point.
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| Looking down the canyon |
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| Hulk in the morning light |
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| Another look at what we probably should have skied instead of bailing on the day :( |
Even with the shortened and failed ski objectives, it was still a great weekend. I would definitely like to get back into this zone again when conditions are better. Lessons learned about winter camping is to have a defensible space. In checking out the tent back in home, it is missing four guy-lines and one of the attachment points from the fly to the base. Hopefully it'll be able to be fixed or warrantied :)
alistair
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