The first weekend of April, at what we thought was close to the end of the ski season we headed out to the eastern sierra to get some spring skiing in. Two weeks after this trip California ended up getting a lot of snow which extended things a fair bit... but when we were out there we didn't know that ;)
Day 1 was Cocaine Chute off of Dana Plateau. With the low snowpack snow we hiked up beside snow for the entirety of V bowl and tied our shoes to a tree at the top for easy pickup on the way back down.
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| Looking at third pillar of Dana from the top of V Bowl |
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| Cocaine chute is the big patch of snow in the centre |
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| Booting... partway up |
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| Topping out onto Dana Plateau |
We ran into some friends who were also out for the weekend. They were skiing Kidney chute before coming back and doing Coke. Their much faster speed put them at the top of coke at the same time as us so we grouped up and descended back to the cars together.
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| Me on Cocaine Chute |
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| Caitlin getting some chalky turns in |
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| A+ corn |
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| Skiing out V Bowl was an exercise of linking up these patches of snow. We actually made it almost all the way down with some bush traverses :) |
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| Checking out Mono Lake in the afternoon |
Day two we went north to Twin Lakes to hit up Matterhorn, and hopefully ski Ski Dreams.
With the light snowpack, there was some amount of guaranteed walking. We did end up putting our skis on a bit early and got about 100m of skinning in before needing to walk for another half kilometer.
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| Twin lakes in the early morning light |
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| Matterhorn, and lots of bushes. |
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| walking over bushes < skiing over bushes |
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| Yeah, not a lot of snow |
We took our skis off to boot up a steep bit, and kept them on for a sidehill traverse. Seemed great until the bulletproof snow suddenly turned soft and we were post-holing every step...
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| waist deep fun. |
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| Looking good! |
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| Me skinning in front of Matterhorn. |
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| Skinning up to the saddle |
When we got to the saddle where we'd bootpack up ski dreams we decided against it. It didn't look worth the bootpack... not super filled in, and the bootpack looked unpleasant in the current conditions. The skiing around looked pleasant... so that's what we did.
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| very nice bowl |
A great day. Very beautiful area. I'd really like to get back mid-winter or something when it would be mostly possible to ski from the car, and in a year when there is a bit more snow.
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