Home > Trip Reports > April 24, 2005, Bean Basin

April 24, 2005, Bean Basin

4/24/05
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Posted by androolus on 4/24/05 9:50pm
Wolfs and I went to Bean Basin in the Teanaway looking for consolidated snow. Instead we found 2 snowshoers hiking down the dirt wearing their snowshoes. Upon arriving in Bean basin, we found a little snow. Enough to skin. We headed to the ridge between Earl and Bill, noticing the ample rocks just below the surface. The north side of the ridge offered a thicker snowpack and some nice, short runs on fine mush. Then back down the south side of ridge. Always fun to hit unseen rocks under the mush. Oh well, at least we avoided getting any core shots and the snow, what there was of it, was more consolidated than alpental's current snowpack.
Original plan had been to ski one of the gullies off Earl but none of these looked like they had enough cover, maybe would have gone but with a lot of base damage and rock-checks. Other than the north facing slopes we skied that are basically on the 'wrong' side of the basin (toward Ingalls Ck), the only other line that looked good that actually drained into the basin was coming off of Mary's and following a curving line into a pair of gladed tracks that ended in the upper basin flat. As we climbed our hill and every tenth poleplant or so bottomed out we looked at that line longingly a few times, but ours did end up working out (mostly) by skiing further toward Earl than where we had ascended.
As with many ski trips, easy road access usually belies the fact that you've arrived too late, and in this case we encountered no snow at all on the road to TH and didn't even find any snow on trail approach until the Bean trail crossing. On the plus side, the glacier lilies and numerous other nice flowers are out :D
I apparently have had my Bean Basin peak terminology wrong, with this misconception also tainting a TR Andrew and I posted for this area last year. What I'd thought of as Bills is actually Bean, and what I'd thought of as Bean is Mary's; Bill being a much more isolated peak further to the NW and sitting above 4th Creek/Beverly drainages, not Bean Ck. Someday we'll have to make a trip back to the area, and go up Beverly Creek and do Iron/Bean in combination, but probably not this year. For ski purposes it's going to be rapidly diminishing returns. We didn't get a good enough look to Ingalls/Fortune/Esmerelda as far as cover to see if those were any better, but Navaho/Miller definitely weren't. BTW high on Stuart (above treeline) looked like decent cover but you'd be carrying a great deal of the overall ascent/descent.
Also: FOUND one pair of pile gloves, near the creek crossing to get to Earl. If any TAY posters claim these PM me with brand, color, and a plausible explanation for why they were where they were, I'd love to hear the story on that  :)

Skip (not TAY Skip, a mere lurker) and I were also up there and saw your tracks. We were headed up the same way, but as we got partway up that snowy slope with the rocks just under the surface, we looked around to see if there was a better choice than guaranteed core shots, and decided to traverse around Bean Basin to get onto the more northerly slopes (Mary's maybe??) where we found ample cover, and got in a few laps of maybe 800-100 vf each. Those nice gullies on Earl just didn't get enough snow this year. Even the floor of Bean Basin will be more dirt/rock than snow in a few days - we were barely making it down into the woods on skis yesterday.

It was a fun day, but we were wondering if maybe we should have seen how far toward the road end we could have driven - perhaps the timing was right for Ingalls instead. The cover looked OK on Ingalls (less chocolate chips than Earl, by far).


The rumor has it that the Ingalls TH has some kind of washout or rockslide half mile shy of TH, but that's not too great a deterrent even if so. I still might go check it out soon. I'd be more concerned that a lot of the slopes on Ingalls and Fortune are relatively large talus blocks, where shallow cover might damage skier as well as ski bases, but perhaps in practice those are easy to avoid. Jim, we never saw your descent tracks; we had town commitments that meant we were out of basin at 1:30 and already back to the car at 3, but I'll bet you chose the line we had been looking at from across the valley, it was obviously the line of choice (by virtue of so many others being so spiny). Funny too that we were in same basin on same day, as we were 365 days prior.

Good point on Ingalls/Fortune. It looked good up high, but we didn't see the approach slopes.

We were on the late shift - we started our first run down at about 2 or so, I think.

It is indeed funny we were both there again, though it's a pretty short window for Bean if you want to drive to the TH, and we were clearly well rewarded last year, it was 30% POP east vs 70% at the crest on Sunday, and all the reports from the crest had been reporting bottomless mush, so I'm not wildly surprised we arrived at the same plan.

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april-24-2005-bean-basin
androolus
2005-04-25 04:50:57