11 PM Friday, Peat pushes his Subaru over the bulldozed talus field. 500 feet of precariously stacked rocks on the right and a 200 foot drop to the creek bed on the left make this one of wilder pieces of road i've ever been on. This early in the year, the dozer has not been through yet and the "road" is littered with debris. Sparks fly from the Subaru's underside. After stashing my truck, we took the Subaru to the next canyon North, our starting point. 4 hours of sleep later, Pete collects water at sunrise. Surely, the cyanide used in the mining claim at the head of this creek is no more. We summited Peak 10,526 in about 3.5 hours. The second picture shows Pete skiing in the fore ground with our second objective, Peak 10, 9??, the biggest peak in the background. Snow did not extend to the valley floor and we were forced to bushwack over scree and thorns. Also, it turns out that our truck was about half a mile up the road from were we came out, oops. In our truck we had stashed gatorade, hot coffee, turkey, goo, and smoothie. We drove about a mile or so to the start of our next ascent, feeling pretty good.
Pete skis away from the death star. Our descent from 10,526 was early and icy, but by the time we decended our second summit the sun had done its damage and we were forced to manage wet slides in complex terain above cliffs, good practice.
Sneaky shortcut.
After climbing a total of 8,000 verticle feet, we photodocumented our second summit, looking back at the first (don't mind the NASCAR shades). The descent from Peak 10,9?? is most excellent for the glisse mountaineer. After dealing with the wet slide hazard off the summit we skied cream cheese frosting for about 1,000 feet to a steep rollover which realeased 6 inches deep upon ski cutting. We skied the wet bed surface down into the debris. From this point we skied about 2,000 more feet of variable but fun snow to within 20 yard of my truck. Tick, tick!
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