December 2, 2018, Heliotrope Ridge

Drove up to Heliotrope ridge today to get some turns in while we keep waiting for the snow to come. Telemetry at Heather Meadows read almost 10" at 4200 feet, so we were expecting to be able to skin from the car or close to it (since I think the trail head is at 3700-3800 feet). What we found was about an inch of snow in the parking lot, and nothing skinnable till the bottom of hogsback ridge. We opted to save our skins and hike the ridge, but you could have reasonably started skinning from shortly after the split for the climbers trail.

Despite expecting to skin from the car we were also expecting to be skiing on a nasty ice crust after rains last week got above 7000 feet, but we were instead greeted with good cold snow. The best turns were had on the glacier, but we rode without hitting any bad rocks to about the middle of hogsback ridge. There must have been 50 tracks coming down the ridge from the day before, and we counted 30 people skinning or skiing while we ate our lunch at the top. Another 9 or 10 more could be seen skinning high on the Coleman glacier towards Colfax Peak.

The trail was icy, so most people were hiking in boots or shoes with micro-spikes till the bottom of the ridge. With the cold clear weather this week the snow should stay pretty good up high for a while.