May 9, 2003, Bean Creek Basin

Conditions seemed similar to those reported for last week - not much change due to the cool weather. The main Teanaway road is still substantially blocked about 1 mile above the Beverly Creek spur road. On the trail, avalanche debris still largely bridging Bean Creek, continuous (barely) snow starting about 4400', nice corn everywhere. Mostly cloudy, so the smooth, frozen snowpack was just starting to soften when Tom and I arrived at the base of Earl's west face. We decided to climb first to the bump on the ridge between Bean and Earl and do a south-facing run. Nice but quite firm on upper steep section, then perfect spring snow down to the creek; totally stable, but uncontrolled slides were a concern. At lunch we checked out the snowpack profile at about 5200': about 3" solidly frozen, then 1" crumbly large grains over a substantial ice layer, then 3" crumbly large grains over a well consolidated base. We opted not to try Earl's west face because it seemed it might be too firm for the steepness, and instead skinned up the valley toward Bill. Heavy showers which had been just to the south for several hours finally arrived, and we stopped about 300' short of Bill's summit due to low visibility. Started skiing down, and of course the visibility started to improve, so we decided to boot up to the top of "Little Bill" (~1/4 mile south of Bill). Great views of the local peaks and a very stormy looking Stuart Range. Had a nice run back down into the basin on the 1/2" of new, through some tree bands and onto the main uptrack.