Home > Trip Reports > April 14-15, 2012, Stuart-Sherpa Glacier Couloir

April 14-15, 2012, Stuart-Sherpa Glacier Couloir

4/14/12
WA Cascades East Slopes Central
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Posted by powdrx on 4/17/12 1:36am
Had a great weekend out on Stuart.  Did the LONG approach to treed basin below the ICG and Sherpa Glacier on Saturday.  Had a really nice night out of the wind and an open bivy is always sweet. 
Up on Sunday with good weather and we started up the Sherpa Glacier only to find icy and slick conditions.  We started booting from 5600-6500ft on the left side of the glacier and then skinned below the blue ice toward the right side only to find icy conditions again.  From there (6800ft) the skis stayed on the back.  But we found pretty decent step-kicking snow all the way up the couloir.  At the top we were in the sun and views were everywhere!!  We took a nice break at ~8500ft.
As we started up toward the false summit, the south side sun was HOT!!  Sweating and softer snow made the going a little more tedious until we peaked around the south side of the false summit around 9100ft to see we were in bad shape for getting to the summit.  My only experience on Stuart was 9ish years ago going up the Cascadian and summiting via the south side of the false summit.  But on Sunday, the time of day and the snow covered slabs kept us 300ft short of the summit.  Anyone have some good winter beta for getting to the summit?  Anyone booted to the top of the false summit and traversed across??
Anyway, now it€™s FUN TIME!!  We locked in and skied icy corn down to the top of the couloir.  A few last pics of the Stuart range and we dropped in to find icy, crusty, wind affected snow.  The ski was fun with a consistent grade all the way down.  It was good leg-burning work, but we were able to link icy turns all the way down.  Right around the exposed blue ice it started to soften up and we ripped all the way to camp.  Awesome day!!  And then the death march out to the car at Bridge Creek... I don't want to talk about it  >:(
We had a great weekend and a great ski.  When it corns up, it will be even better!! 
Nice!  Hope we get more of that kind of weather in the coming months.

I was hoping you would go into great detail about the deproach back to the car!  Nice tour! I'm hoping things soften up a lot more.

HAHA!!  It is a long way out and my feet don't want to talk about it.  Awesome trip for sure.

Nice work dude! That's a sweet line. Snow conditions sound a little tricky, but still looks like you guys had a good time. How was the coverage on the cascadian and ulrichs?

From above and what I could see, the Cascadian was snow all the way down.  Couldn't see down Ulrich's from that vantage point.

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april-14-15-2012-stuart-sherpa-glacier-couloir
powdrx
2012-04-17 08:36:14