July 2, 2011, Skyscraper Mtn

I've wanted to snowboard Skyscraper since hiking it nearly 6 years ago on a cool late September day.  Since that time I have seen images of the north face and hatched the plan to go up from the south, over the top, and ride the north face down to the meadows at 5500'.  The typical late opening of Sunrise by MRNP has made this plan impossible as too much snow has melted by the time we have been allowed up there.  Last spring I decided to take matters into my own hands and approach via FSR 73, Lk Eleanor, and Grand Park.  That turned into a fantastic trip up the closer, irresistable slopes of Mt Freemont and a perfect photo-op of the north side of Skycraper covered in snow:   http://www.turns-all-year.com/skiing_snowboarding/trip_reports/index.php?topic=16849.0   

Kudos to the Park for kicking it in gear this season and getting Sunrise open last Friday.  Even though it was nearly a month later in the year it seemed a good bet with the deeper snow-pack that the trip could go from Sunrise.  Brian and I arrived at 7am for the front parking spot and were off by 7:30.  Having never toured from Sunrise before our only mishap of the day was not dropping down from the lodge before heading up, but once corrected we skinned quickly up to Frozen Lk for a short break and look at the objective.  My excitement for this tour took a bit of a gut punch as it looked like the snow on the south face of Sky was completely melted off except for what appeared from the distance to be a narrow finger of old cornice snow along the east ridge extending just short of the summit.  I started considering Plan B's, but seeing how much snow was on north facing slopes I still felt confident the north side would be good to the bottom, our time was looking good, and though I didn't want to boot up dirt and rock to the summit, it was no more than 500'.  We were both in for a big tour/exploration kind of day and just maybe we could skin that finger of snow, so off we went.  We were pleasantly surprised how quickly we put another mile behind us as we rode down and across most of Berkely Park, switched back to skins and soon found ourselves a closer look at that sketchy snow finger.  We booted a short distance to the bottom of the finger got back on our boards  and were able to skin nearly to its end before booting the final pitch to the summit.  The summit views are fabulous.  Unfortunately, though expected, we still had to down climb a spicey rock section, traverse a small plateau along the north ridge, and hope that from the top of the face it would look good.  I began to get a bit nervous thinking how disheartening it was going to be for both of us if the look was bad (rock face, crappy snow, or no snow down to the bottom).  I took the look from a perfect, flat launching spot and yelled back to Brian that we hit our promise land for the day  8).  After all that work and knowing we had a lot of work to go on the climb out we were anxious to ride our big slope for the day, so we got our boards ready and hit it.  Sweet butter turns all the way to the bottom with very little of the suncups or runnels we encountered earlier in the morning.  After a nice break in the shade we headed for Lodi Creek, which turned out to be one of the prettiest creeks in the Park, and up Berkely Park.  We managed one more nice set of turns off the shoulder of First Burroughs and a short skin back to the Sunrise Zoo  ;).  Another little nothing of a 7000' WA peak, but one that delivered a great adventure for someone who loves both the planning and execution of an off-beat trip.   

First Pic:  North slopes from Freemont last year.
Second Pic:  Skyscraper from Frozen Lake.
Third Pic:  Brian skinning up the skinny finger.