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Trip Report    

Backcountry Ski/Snowboard - Alpental Backcountry

Had a worthwhile outing despite challenging conditions

  • Road suitable for all vehicles
  • Recent inversion weather and lack of new snow made the up track from Lot 4 to Source Lake challenging travel.    Ski crampons made travel through the forest where the bombed and refrozen snow surface was quite firm more effective.  Without ski crampons,  removing skis and walking would have been more secure.  We did observe boot prints from other travelers -- these boot prints hardly sank into the surface -- so traceling on foot in the forest would not involve post holing.   
    Above Source lake the snow surface became much less icy.   When we reached the 4300 ft level,  one team member expressed concern about proceeding any higher due to the concerns about skiing down the firm and lumpy snow.    So we transitioned and skied down to Source Lake.   Suprizing everyone we actually found some relatively smooth snow more to the south side of the Source Lake basin -- where the slopes had been sheltered from the sun.   There was even a 2 inch layer of soft snow on top of the crust.    We had a lunch break and then made two short laps on this fairly enjoyable snow -- skinning up to the bottom of avalanche debris pile at the bottom of Bryant Couloir (4000ft) and skiing this OK snow back down to Source Lake.

    We skied out the normal "Alpental Return Route"    The shallow and firm snowpack resulted in more challenging conditions on the return track than typical -- with many places where sidestepping was required and places where careful movements were required to avoid falling into a tree well or in one place even a creek.     I observed that a snowboarder from some other party had fallen into the creek at that location and was able to climb out by using their snowboard horizontially as an anchor / handhold.   Yikes.