S
smallberries
Guest
As soon as I saw that the avalanche dangers had been lifted, and the forecast was for clear weather, I got together with a couple of my chums last weekend and we made our first trip to Tuckerman this year. There had been a HUGE slab avalanche on the headwall on the night of Friday the 26th. It left a 5' drop-off where it fractured off across most of the headwall. The bottom of the ravine was a messy debris field of chunks of snow. The first impression of the ravine was that the rest of it would let go at any time, but the rangers said it was solid, and you could see people climbing and skiing down all over it. We decided that the Left Gully looked safer, but in fact as we ascended we found conditions were freezing up as the shadows crept over the gully. At the top it was a unanimous decision to hike and traverse across to that hanging headwall where the snow was much softer. The Little Headwall was rather dicey with a couple of stream crossings. The Sherburne Trail was barely passable, but we did manage to make it all the way back to the parking lot.
