June 2, 2012, Birthday Tour via Spires Gulley

    For the second week in a row I headed for Washington Pass and the Birthday Tour area. From the beginning of the day I realized that the weather was going to give us a little of everything, starting with rain at 7 AM as we began our ascent up Spires Gulley.         video

The start of the climb up Spires Gulley is at about 5000'.
As we climbed the sky got very dramatic with the sun poking through at times and lighting up Kangaroo Ridge.
Towards the top of the gulley boot packing was necessary because of lack of snow

We continued booting it all the way to Blue Peak Col

After reaching Blue Peak Col at about 5500' we had a few moments of viewing

And then the snow came and we were socked in for the beginning of the descent down Madison Pass.

We couldn't see much for the first couple 100' , but the snow was nice and we kept our turns nice and tight. It was nice to run into Jaimie for the second week in a row, but this week we were the only two groups on the hill at that time. He was headed back up Madison Pass as we were going down.  And then suddenly
the sun showed itself once again. The riding was great, but got a little sticky towards the bottom. We were having a blast whatever the conditions. The hike back up to the Kangaroo Pass area begins at about 6100'.

On the hike back up to Kangaroo pass the conditions were varying from sun to cloud cover to sun with snow, overall a great day to witness.
On the way up I noticed the snow was some of the fluffiest corn I have seen this season, which got me excited for the other side because it didn't look like anybody had been through that way in at least a couple of days.

Once we reached our high point at about 7000' the scenery was breathtaking as Kangaroo Ridge was really lit up, and looking into the couloir I noticed some great untouched corn that I was expecting and felt stoked for the upcoming final descent.

The snow was great as expected, but we moved through rather fast with big cornices looming and signs of some big ones recently coming down. As we traversed back toward our starting point we came across one recent big slide that continued a couple thousand feet down the mountain with some car size boulders of snow.

We skied all but a 100 or so yards to the car. It was a great tour. Here is are final look at the Early Winter Spires and Liberty Bell.