January 15, 2006, Norse Peak

My wife and I spent the night at Crystal and slept in, resulting in a rather late 10:00 AM start from mthe base area up the road to the Boullion Basin Trail. The weather was snowing with a stiff NNW wind and temperatures in the low 20's.  There was about six inches of new light over Thursday and Friday's heavy snow and rain.  We skinned up the road above the Crystal Chapel to the Boullion Basin Trailhead where we followed a well established skin track. The snow was dust on breakable crust at this elevation (4800ft). We took a left track and climbed two steep steps before crossing the creek and regaining the main trail.  We left the trail where it enters Boullion Basin and began heading north, switching back up the ridge of the open slope above the prominent rock out croppings.The wind was scouring the ridge and depositing cohesive slabs on the lee sides(SE through SW) of obstacles on a base of water ice.  The sun began breaking through, giving great views of the crowds at the resort.  All this made for interesting skiing with lots of edging on ice. But we made good progress by hugging the north ridge and reached the 6500 ft saddle above Cement Basin at 12:30 where we dug a pit on a NW facing, 35 degree slope out of the wind.  This showed non-cohesive snow down to one foot and no distinct layers down to five feet with good adhesion throughout.  Finally got a shear 2.5 ft down on low density snow from Thursday. The time of day and slabby snow observed on SE to SW aspects on the way up made our decision not to ski into Cement or Lake Basin >:(

We toured North toward Norse peak and began skiing a treed, wind protected West facing slope which had bottomless snow and huge tree wells. In some cases the snow formed narrow bridges between trees which wanted to collapse to either side as we passed through.  We kept trending Southwest  until the trees opened and we had blissful turns for 1500 ft in boot top fluff over bottomless snow down the north side of the avalanche path above the lower parking lot ;D.  We traversed one at a time across the avalanche slope and regained the trees and eventually the road leading back to the upper east parking lot at 2:00 PM>  Beat the traffic home.
All told, a great short tour.