March 2, 2008, Lichtenberg Southwest face

My first post - how exciting!

Preston and I headed up Nason creek with the idea of finding something to ski on the southwest side of Lichtenberg.  The new snow was already pretty heavy- about 5-6 inches on top of a very breakable crust with this funny glacial blue Slurpee snow underneath.  The new stuff was about boot high by about 4000€™.  At 4600€™ we hit a pretty wind scoured face so we took off our skis and started booting.  I think we lost track of time and we ended up walking all the way to the top, just as a cloud came and sat on the summit.  We waited for things to clear up before heading down. The first 300-400€™ were pretty horrible, low angle solid, scoured crusty junk.  Fortunately as things steepened up a bit, the snow got better.  Great turns even though the snow was pretty heavy and highly variable€”partly because we had no tracks to contend with.

Now I have to digress with a short story.  I grew up in Nebraska.  The only skiing I did was our annual trip to Winter Park, CO.  We would ski three or four days and then my dad would pull this marathon drive back overnight and then make us go to school the next day.  So our trips always ended heading east on I-70 with the sun starting to set, our mini-van smelling of stinky socks and sunscreen, our faces burned and lips chapped and my sister and I looking out the window at all the peaks and faces and saying to each other €œWow that would be really cool if you could ski that, you€™d have the whole thing to yourselves.€  I would spend the rest of the overnight drive back half awake, half asleep trying to scheme ways that one could ski in places where there are no lifts.  So many years later, you can imagine I was pretty happy at the end of our run to stand at the valley bottom and look back to see this:






We had the whole thing to ourselves.

We skied all the way back down to the valley floor, which is surprisingly a 2000€™ run.  Also surprising, was that it was only noon.  So we headed up for another lap, this time skinning back up what we skied and avoided booting up to the top.  From the saddle we saw a whole bunch of groups coming up from Smithbrook Rd and Lichtenwasser Lake.  Everyone appeared to be skiing back down the northeast side.  We headed back down the southwest face.  On our way out we saw a couple of large glacial blue €œslushalanches€ (Preston coined this term) on the southeast face.  Back to the car by 3:00, kind of nice to drive home on Hiway 2 while it€™s still light.