April 28, 2007, Kaleetan Peak

We took a shot at Kaleetan Saturday and completed our little series of spring trips through that neck of the woods. Saturday started cloudy but the clouds burned off earlier than expected, and we suffered a lost sunglasses setback on the way up to Bryant Col, which put us behind schedule.

Gorgeous views and warm sunshine made for a beautiful day, but as you would expect the snow quickly became soft, and was often downright dicey. So we got what Eric referred to as "another thriller": Skiing off Kaleetan down to Melakwa Pass required staying ahead of the huge surface sluff slides we kicked off. I eventually got caught and took a 25 meter ride as we traversed across the lower slopes of chair. I used a conveniently placed tree to stop just before I would have slid into an even bigger torrent running laterally beneath me. It was... educational. Lessons learned, we were never so happy to ski out onto a dubiously frozen lake in the springtime.  :)

As Oyvind_Henningsen noted in his Kaleetan post, cornices in the approach couloir were looking rather fierce. We chose a bootpack up the high North side of the couloir to stay out of harm's way. Has anyone worked out an alternative to that approach? It looked like someone skinned from the valley around the west side of the lower point south of Kaleetan. It looked like a much longer approach, but much safer at least from the summit perspective.

On the bright side, the skiing from Bryan Col down to the lakes was just great, and the return drop from the snow lake saddle to the valley was actually kind of fun. Another vote for the Atomic Kailas: Add stability in skiing refrozen avy debris to their list of merits. I mounted mine with Dynafits, sold the tele gear and never looked back. Now I just enjoy watching the tele-gods I tour with do their thing, and happily provide the essential "nice turns" compliments...