In the prior two weeks a lot of snow had fallen, pushing the totals for January to 14'. Everything seemed perfectly teed up for a big day on Saturday: a rare break in the weather, a stable snowpack with 2' of fluff on it, cold temperatures, and a group of ski-tourers with raised ambitions. The last point is worth expanding on. After I had set the bar at 10k a couple of weeks previously, everyone else had gone out and matched it. From now on, 10k was the starting point! The only potential problem we faced in our outing was trailbreaking: all the new snow had made it quite difficult. With that in mind, we decided to go to Argenta: there would surely be someone else there to help us do the work.
Ascending the main Argenta slide path would give us a number of options.
My day did not start well. We were stuck on the Tarmac at JFK for 3hrs after a luggage trolley was blown by the wind into the side of the plane. 3 1/2hrs of sleep didn't seem like good preparation. Starting from the bottom of Argenta at 7:30am, the dawn-patrollers had put in a nice track, so up we went, reaching the Kessler E Ridge in 1hr45 min. This broke my record: JFK to 10,000' in 13hrs 15mins!
As soon as we hit the ridge, there was a bit of frenzy: we ripped off the skins, stashed some gear, and skied 3000' down Argenta to the road in one pitch. We felt a little bad poaching the main gut ahead of the dawn-patrollers, but they were still ascending to ski a more technical line. Skiing down was really good: settled low density powder under clear skies all the way to the road with the occasional blast of the horn from the traffic below. We had passed a number of ascending groups on the way down which then triggered the next frenzy at the bottom of the slide path: skins on, heels free, rapid ascent to try to pass the others.
This duly happened which precipitated the conversation of the season so far:
AC : "Good Morning" (on catching the first group)
Beater : "Good Morning"
AC : "We're on our second lap, trying to get ahead before all the beaters turn up"
Beater : "Well, that's us!"
The lack of sleep was starting to catch up with me. The others were ahead and skied a quick lap in upper Argenta. When I got to the ridge, I finally got a chance to look around.
Mineral
Bonkers
Circle Awl/All
The Kessler Ridge
It was still only 11:30am, and I already had 6,000' under my belt. The others joined and we skied the main gut again to the road.
After a quick pause to let my frozen hands thaw- it was really quite cold out there - I climbed the slide path for the 3rd time to the ridge. From there we ascended the ridge to Kessler Peak. Off the peak we skied one of the Greaseball lines, knocking off a small slab on a steep rocky section, before traversing by the lawnmower to ski the trees to lookers left of Argenta. Back up the slide path again for the final lap, decending via the NW Trees.
A HUGE day: 11k for me, 13k for TB, and a whopping 14.2k for AC + LM. No skiing photos unfortunately: no time and it was too cold!