Day 7: Birthday Powder Part Deaux

The next day, Sunday Dec. 6, is our birthday and we decide it was so good the day before, we are going back up and doing it all over again. Same route, up and over from Waterfall Canyon, which is an immensely more delightful route than up the Swamp skin track. Yes, it is longer, but you pass through so many different zones, it feels more like a tour than a run. We have discovered that often in the summer months when we are doing multi-day peaks, I am often stronger and more energized on day 2, which is weird but whatever. I was banking on that today because the previous day had been very tiring. This touring business is tiring in a different kind of way, most of which I attribute to the amount of mental energy expenditure it requires. Gear switches, planning, avalanche awareness, partner communication, there is a just a lot for your brain to process.

So we are marching up and we find this delightful forest embrace, like a root that found a long-lost friend in the dark of the earth and said, I can't believe I found, I'm never letting you go, even if we get thrust up into the sunlight and snow.

At the top, we make a rough plan of where to ski, which we predict will take us through a brief section of mild and manageable sun crust, then over towards a section that should have remained soft and unaffected by the sun. But as we start to maneuver through some funky wind drifts towards the level spot where we will finalize our plan, I realize: I'm tired.  Shit. Here we are, now it's actually our birthday, we've seen how great this snow is, and I have to pull it together and make some turns that are worth it, dick around through the sun crust and get over to where it is good, and then muster up enough strength to do another lap of some sort. Great.

So we get down to where it is good, and it is still really really good, and we decide to stay on that side and do 2 more mini-laps instead of heading all the way over for another full lap that will take us back to the top. JC seems okay with the plans but I can tell he really wants to go all the way back up to the top, but whatevs. 

He employs a nice strategy of skiing up our ski tracks for a bit, then we have another little snack and some tea from the thermos, take our skins off, and ski back down to where we just were, super soft snow, and super fun turns. Another snack, a little more tea, skins back on, skin up our tracks again, another snack, a little more tea, and skins are off again.

From here, we can look across the canyon and see two other skiers reaching the top of the Magnum, and make nice and easy (or so it appears) turns all the way to the bottom. Here is the picture but I don't think you can make out the humans unless you know where they are.

It is the sloping coulior that goes from the big snowy field on the bottom left to the snowy edge in the upper right that is half in sun and half in snow.

There are people out all over, enjoying the perfect weather and snow conditions.

So any who, we ski down again, this time all the way to the road and out to the Ophir Road, back to the car.

Laps on the good snow. That little grove of trees up there was our tea and snack spot.

Here comes the birthday boy!

All in all, a very successful birthday weekend. We don't usually get good snow in early December. This year, we are certain, will remain memorable for quite some time.