Holy dumpage :headbang: :headbang: :headbang: 38″ at the house.

A few pics from last weekend.

Early lap on Waterhouse on Sat. Dave takes an “energy smoke break” on top.

Great snow, lots of tracks. Shoulda stayed in the bc that day; instead went to the Heave, where there were even more tracks. Tried to avoid some of them with the Gville run at the end of the day, which was great for maybe the first 1k. Then it turned to nasty crust, then dirt and a long hike out, followed by waiting at the bus stop in the dark only to have the hourly bus decide to not pick us up. Sweet.

I know people at the Heave do this run all the time, and many of them probably don’t even consider it “real” bc. But it is. Here’s a pic of some avy debris in one of the main bowls people like to ride. Looks like this probably went on maybe Thurs. Note the rider at the left of the debris for scale.

Sunday, hooked up with bcrider and powderjunkie and headed out to Angora. The plan was to hit Halls of the Gods. We started about 1/2 hour too late. We got to the top of Echo and there were already 5 people on top of Halls. Oh well.

Humongous cornices on Echo:

3 guys that got to Halls before us:

They reported that there were also already 2 tracks in it before they got there. BCR and PJ decided to bail. BCR mentioned some BS about having “already gotten his couloir fix”. Well, I hadn’t gotten mine, so I decided I was going to drop it anyway. I had driven up separately and so wasn’t on a schedule.

We also saw 2 other splitboarders who had gotten there just ahead of us, and were dropping into mini-Halls, which appeared untracked. I found out later that this was none other than BGnight:

Here’s the view from the top of the rider’s left entrace to Halls, where I dropped in:

Looking across at Cathederal peak, at what I believe is the line Jeremy Jones rode in My Own Two Feet. Serious.

I made one turn and then tried out my newest snow-stability test, which is to plow the nose of the board deep into the snow, thereby initiating a sudden headplant. This has the dual effect of creating a load on the snow pack, while simultaneously allowing for a close-up view of any suspect layers.

It looked good to go.

Once I adjusted to the fact that the snow was still going to be deep pow, even with 5 tracks in it, it was great fun. Sweet pow all the way down the chute, a little more consolidated on the apron, but fun and you can really open it up. Got down to the bottom, and the 3 skiiers had already set the skin track out. Score!

At this point I had already pretty much decided that I had to do another lap.

Looking back up at Halls from the bottom:

Another angle on the riders right entrance, which looks like it might be just filled in enough (or more likely, just enough to cover some sucker rocks):

Partway up the skin track, here’s a good view of mini-Halls. The narrower chute to lookers right of that was untracked, so that’s where I decided to go for lap 2.

Happiness is climbing in someone else’s skin track.

Lap 2 was great. Untracked pow in a nice line, then again onto the speedy apron below. I ran into 3 guys from the TGR forum there who had just done Halls, so we skinned out together. Then rode Angora bowl down to the lake. I was glad to have BCR/PJ’s tracks, because there are a lot of cliff bands to negotiate, which aren’t obvious from above.

Side note, at the top of the last climb I found that my skin had a huge chunk of solid ice stuck to it! Wonder what caused that? I’ve had snow glop to my skins before, but never ice. It was probably in the 30’s most of the day. I had to scrape it off with my Whippet!

3/22 – Pow. Deep f*#^ing pow.

:doobie: :headbang: :bananas: :drool: :thumpsup:

@powderjunkie wrote:

Just in time for the stopped traffic (2 times) down 50.

Yowza, you were in that too? 50 was a nightmare last night, 4 hours from south lake to Twin Bridges with a whiny dog up front in the truck cab with us. Still worth it though, it was an awesome day of riding!

Snow came in a little bigger than predicted, at least on the West Shore. I would say over 6 inches above 7000ft. The super light snow was a little dust on crust like and sluffed off the crust a bit, but should ride better with some settlement. Conditions are very thin at near lake level, but decent to good up higher.

Beautiful conditions up there.

Found heavy pow on top of Saturday’s slush off Tamarack Peak. No complaints here about pow turns in May 😀

Pretty big wet slide on South Bowl of Tallac, visible from Meyers (which is where I saw it from). I think it went today, prolly just a couple nights of weak to no freeze. Nothing shocking, but not something to ignore either.

Anybody know if the snow bridge at the hairpin at Blue Canyon near Sonora Pass is still intact?

Sonora Pass- Many turns were made, hiking was easy, and the snow was pretty good

Laurel Canyon and Red Slate- Many miles were hiked with snowboards on the packs to snowline, and just when we thought we were actually going to finally climb and ride this thing, rain started pouring from the sky. We tried to wait it out, but it never let up and it ended up raining during the entire hike out.

Thought I’d report the large wet slides Buffy and I were able to trigger on the rider’s left arm of the Y. We threw a couple fist sized rocks which triggered slides that grew and grew. We could here them gain momentum throughout the whole chute. Rider’s right arm seemed nice but we were concerned about the section below the junction. We rode the bowl instead which was good and stable. The weather had been funky (didn’t freeze, sunny, cloudy, hail, rain, and a little snow) so that probably contributed to the funky conditions.