The system that moved through late Tues / early Wed was to be replaced by a much jucier storm. The main part was due to hit late Thursday, with some prefrontal precipitation starting in the early hours of Thursday. Whilst we weren't really sure what prefrontal precipitation was, we did know that the winds were going to crank. With all this in mind, the avvy center put out a high danger rating.
In such conditions, there is only one place to go: Reynolds. As we left the Spruces parking lot it was still snowing quite hard. A couple of returning dawn patrollers offered up 'inverted' and that set the tone for the day. Ascending to Reynolds, the trail breaking was fairly heinous - with perhaps 12" of dense inverted snow to deal with. That, of course, was breaking trail on top of the trail from the previous day. When we lost that, it became a bottomless thigh-bursting wallow.
An attempt to show how deep the trailbreaking was.
With four of us sharing the chores, we made it close to the summit of Reynolds in surprisingly good time. Even out in the open, there wasn't that much sign of the wind-effect or any cracking in the new snow. Shying away from the steeper E face, we decided to ski a more SE aspect off the ridge.
It was roughly at this point that we realized that breaking trail through the bottomless snow was actually easier than trying to ski down it! Too much snow sounds a bit odd, but any attempt to go downhill involved pushing ahead of you an ever increasingly large amount of snow until either the snow or the pain in your thighs stopped you. The only alternative was skiing the skin track!
Undeterred, we went over to Tom's Hill. The combination of backcountry bumps (it's a popular area) and existing tracks made descending an almost viable option. There we stayed, cranking out the laps. As the afternoon progressed the combination of settling snow and an influx of other skiers cutting up the bottomless powder started to make the whole skiing experience almost enjoyable.
We exited via the E side of Tom's Hill. Unfortunately this was untracked which would have meant another 1,000' of suffering. However, we managed to find our saviour: a splitter, and an avvy forecaster too (BK!). He seemed above it all, so he laid the track down and we followed it!
I didn't take too many pictures, but here's some suffering in the pow.
And what happens when your tips get stuck.
Not a skiing classic, but certainly a highly entertaining day with 4,500' of ascending. I should probably be allowed to add in the decending!