Mt Washington 2/28, 3/2 and 3/3/2013

I took an AIARE Level I avalanche course this weekend and won't get into the details of that here (except to say it was great, with excellent conditions for really interesting field observations) but will report on skiing I did before and during the program.

THURS 2/28 - GULF OF SLIDES TRAIL

The class started Friday morning at the AMC center at Crawford Notch so I'd planned to drive up no later than the night before. When Mt. Washington was forecast to get around a foot of snow Wednesday night, I decided to go up as early as possible Thursday. Based on where I expected course field work to take place, I decided on my free day to take my first tour up the Gulf of Slides Trail, though not all the way up into the slides themselves because of avalanche danger combined with the knowledge I did not yet have on how to assess conditions.

I arrived at Pinkham Notch at 8 a.m. and was heading up the trail by 8:40. Eyeballing it I'd say there was 8" of new snow at the base, and though I'd feared it would be wet as temps were close to freezing, at that hour it was chalky. At the split for the GOST from the base a skier descended from the Sherburne and it looked like he had nice powder turns. But I was surprised to see breaks of blue sky and no wind, and as I began climbing the temps rose - snow started sliding off spruce limbs at lower elevations, and the powder began getting a little sticky.

Someone had laid down a skin track on GOST but it appeared to be just one skier. Whoever it was, I figured the odds weren't great they'd be heading up into the slides because of the avy threat, but I'd be good with second tracks. Maybe a third of the way up another skier apparently came in (not sure where from) but I'd be good with third tracks ...

A couple photos I took on the up:

Looking up ...




and, later, looking down:




Maybe halfway up, one skier came down to get first tracks. Not too long thereafter someone on tele gear was the second. Still plenty of canvas for me to work with.

Now I am not exactly the world's fastest skinner so it didn't surprise me, even if it did disappoint me a little, to hear someone gaining on me. OK, fourth tracks it would have to be. Then I saw it wasn't one person but ... SEVEN :-o ... 10th tracks didn't really have such a nice ring to it :sad: ... but as they caught up with me I learned they were in an AIARE Level II class so I figured they were heading up into the slides and wouldn't be skiing down before me :-D .

At just about exactly the two-hour mark, after passing the first rescue cache, I reached my objective, a gully that marks the first major avy runout across the trail. This is looking up the trail but down into the runout:



(Droid photo and I didn't have my glasses on so apparently I'd set effects to black-and-white)

The GOS is not in the avy forecast area and I'd left the Pinkham pack room before the morning advisory was posted, but with 12.7" of new snow reported at the summit and substantial winds during the storm, I assumed avy danger up in the slides would be Considerable if not High. My plan all along was to play it safe and not cross any runout zones - actually there is an extremely small one below this one but I was alongside the AIARE II group at the time and the leader said that one has run across the trail maybe once in 100 years. So here I transitioned and started down. (Estimated elev.: 3900', gain of around 1900' from Pinkham base 2032'.)

The snow was a bit sticky but turning wasn't too tough. What a classic New England trail - some nice steep drops, sometimes narrow, often wider, twisting and turning with the terrain. All hail the CCC. I reached the base and decided against taking another lap there or on the Sherbie given the now above-freezing temps down low - plus I knew I'd have plenty more skinning in my near future.

to be cont'd ...

Nice!

No skiing Friday 3/1 aside from skinning involved in companion rescue drills just above Route 302 at Crawford Notch. (That evening I checked the Mount Washington Avalanche Center's weekend advisory and learned there had been two human-triggered avalanches that day, one that caught but did not injure a couple skiers in Lobster Claw in Tux and another that killed a solo climber in Pinnacle Gully in Huntington Ravine. This certainly focused my mind on the remaining coursework ...)


SAT 3/2 - COG/JACOB'S LADDER

After a few hours of classroom work in the morning we drove to the Marshfield Station base of the Mt Washington Cog Railway (elev. ~2700') where we found about 2" of new snow and flurries. We skinned up to the beginning of Jacob's Ladder (4725') amid light snow and learned about digging test pits and making snow observations. I don't have much visual documentation, and visibility was too poor for more than the occasional vague glimpse into Burt and Ammonoosuc ravines, but here's a video of a couple other skiers descending alongside Jacob's Ladder:


We measured 4" of new snow at that spot on top of a snowpack more than 9' deep (quite uniform in the test pit, no weak layers we could find, at that spot on the west side, anyway). We descended around 3:30 p.m. and though numerous skiers had preceded us, aside from the gully at the top the trail was wide enough that I got many turns in untracked if shallow pow, on top of a supportive but not sticky surface. On our way up we'd noticed surface hoar on low growth above the snowpack and alongside the Cog tracks (see photo, along with info on the avy course, at the instructor's blog) and that suggested not just a lack of wind over the preceding days but also that temps had not gone above freezing there, unlike at lower elevations on the east side (GOST and Sherbie)..

There was some thin cover midway down but nothing too sketchy. Here's one photo as the group reassembled for a quick break on the descent at the Waumbek Tank:



(Again, black-and-white for some reason ...)

Below this were a few places where we could dip into trees on skier's left, though being with a group toward the end of the day I wasn't going to explore. I do know the Ammo Ravine, which (facing downhill) is to skier's left of the Cog, consistently veers toward the right approaching the base so the area potentially available for tree skiing would become progressively more narrow.

Anyway, I must say the skin up along the Cog was somewhat steeper than I had anticipated, with a couple spots near Halfway House requiring kickturns. It was around this time that, skinning in a group for the first time, I realized that while my overall fitness level has been OK for the kind of skiing I'd been doing the past few years - aggressive powder hunting but 80/20 lift-served/off-piste, with most of my touring confined to very small local hills - I am going to need to get serious about fitness to do the kind of backcountry skiing I aspire to.

Gravity worked great on the way down though!

cont'd ...

SUN 3/3 - TUCKERMAN RAVINE

We met at Pinkham Notch for group trip planning and discussion and began ascending Tuckerman Ravine Trail about 9:15 a.m. About 2.5 hours later, after several stops including at the Hermit Lake snow plot, we reached Hermit Lake, where we ate, talked with USFS snow ranger Frank Carus, and decided that conditions permitted us to continue on to our objective: the bottom of Left Gully, via Little Headwall. Skinning up Little Headwall had several extremely challenging parts (see above re my fitness ...) but I ultimately I made it without delaying things too badly.

Again I have little visual documentation; I do have this video of our group beginning to traverse the ravine floor across a potential runout zone from Little Headwall to Left Gully ....



... but unfortunately by the time visibility improved a short time thereafter and the sun even came out for a bit, my Droid battery died in the cold.

I'd been to the top of Little Headwall once before, the season before last, but visibility was very poor then so this was the first time I got an up-close personal view of the Tuckerman bowl (in winter or otherwise, sad to say). An awe-inspiring sight, to say the least, making the work to get there well worthwhile.

As we reached the bottom of Left Gully (~4400') we did see someone ascending Left Gully and a total of maybe a dozen skiers or boarders playing elsewhere in lower reaches of the bowl. We could see remains of a crown to the left of the Lip, and the debris field from the avy Friday in Lobster Claw. At one point the wind - which for several days had been remarkably light for Mt Washington - picked up to probably 25-30 mph or so and, as forecast, shifted from NE to NW. We could see blowing snow loading into the start zone atop Left Gully. Without getting into too much detail of the avy course, I will say we had prime conditions for observations - our compression tests found weak layers approximately 15 cm and 40 cm down and the instructors performed what proved to be a classic Rutschblock test, fairly easily causing the top layer of new snow to slide and without much more effort getting that to step down through the deeper wind slab.

We dropped into Little Headwall around 3 p.m. Cover was fairly thin so the route often was narrow, and there were several holes through to the Cutler River (a snowboarder from another group found one of these the hard way ...). The Sherburne was surprisingly good - great packed powder up high with some untracked here and there on the edges, while human groomin' made for eminently carvable conditions amid smallish bumps even down below where temps had gone above freezing in previous days (though not this day).

In sum, a close to perfect weather window (could've been slightly colder Thursday), great educational experience with prime conditions for the observational objectives, quite a workout and a lot of fun skiing on Mount Washington. Pretty excellent four days in my book.

This is an awesome trip report. You liked the instructor?

Would anyone else be interested in setting up an AZ Avy class next year? I would love to do this.

Thanks for the trip report on the AIARE course. Looks like Mt. Washington is shaping up well. I'm hoping for a fine and long spring skiing season up there. I miss the GOS and I hope to finally make it into Oakes Gulf this year.

Nick said:

This is an awesome trip report. You liked the instructor?

Click to expand...

Yeah, Dave was great, definitely knows his stuff. Another EMS guide, Keith Moon, assisted mainly with field work and he too was great.

It's a lot of information to absorb in a few days; I've already been rereading the study guide to reinforce things while it's fresh.