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Dragontail Peak/Triple Couloirs

Private one day car-to-car bike, ski, and climb of the Triple Couloirs

Vik Sahney Vik Sahney
April 18, 2025
  • Road suitable for all vehicles

  • E-bikes recommended to shortcut the closed road to the trailhead.  Saves you 4 miles and 1,300ft each way.

    Approach to Colchuck is challenging patchy snow, deep snow, fallen trees, etc.  Don't plan on skinning up this.  It is slow going and postholing is likley depenging on time of day and temperatures.

    Colchuck Lake was frozen solid and we skied across.

    Route is in great shape. Good step kicking conditions in all 3 Couloirs.  The Runnels is the crux and finding pro can be difficult.  Simulclimbing this section can save you a HUGE amount of time but obviously carries risk.

    We skied from just the below the summit.  Snow was highly varieable depending on aspect and time in sun and ranged from ice to slush as well as avalanche debris fields.

On Thursday 4/17/2025 Travis and I (Vik) climbed the Triple Couloir route on Dragontail Peak in a 15 hour car to car effort leveraging e-bikes, skis, and climbing gear.

We met at the Monroe Park and Ride at 2am and drove to where the road was closed, just past the Eight Mile Campground.  At 4:15am here we changed to e-bikes.  We were able to ride 3.7 road miles gaining 1,300ft until we hit continuous snow.  At that point (~5:20am) we left the bikes and our tennis shoes and changed into our ski boots and started skinning up the road.  We were able to ski up about one mile of road to reach the trailhead.  Shortly thereafter the trail became unskiable due to fallen trees, dirt sections, creek crossings, etc.  We began booting.

We arrived at Colchuck Lake, put the skis back on and skied across the lake at 8:50am.  We switched back to boots, put on harnesses and crampons and started up to the route through moderate snow, never deeper than knee deep.

At 10am we started up the First Couloir.  We soloed the First Couloir and reached the Runnels where we used an old pin for an anchor.  Here we roped up.  Travis led the Runnels in one long simul climbing block.  He placed a two progress capture pulleys off gear to add protection in addition to a few other pieces (two short screws, a nut, pecker).  We finished the Runnels, put the rope away, and were starting the Second Couloir by 12:15pm.

We reached the Dragon's Sword by 1:20pm, climbed the Third Couloir and reached the Summit by 2-2:15pm.

We packed up our harnesses, gear, rope, ice axes, and got out our skis for a nice long ski descent.  We skied from just below the summit, to avoid the summit rocks.  We skied down and over to Asgard Pass with HIGHLY variable ski conditions from ice to slush depending on the aspect and time in the sun.  We got back down to the lake in under 30 minutes and skate skied across the lake.

We tried to ski descend a bit, but again the trail was too overgrown and patchy to support that.  Unfortunately that led to a LONG boot pack out trying desparately to avoid postholing to your waist in soft snow.  Once we reached the trailhead, we were able to put on skis and glide back to our bikes.  At our bikes we were relieved to take off the ski boots in exchange for our tennis shoes.  Unfortunately the patchy snow we had riding through was now soft slush so the first 15 minutes or so was walking the bikes and pushing hard through the snow till we reached the dry road.  Then it was a long coasting descent of ~3.5 miles back to the car.  15h car-to-car.

Had dinner in Leavenworth and drove back to Monroe P&R.