The next storm, which didn't roll in on Saturday afternoon, turned up early Sunday morning. It wasn't really clear how much snow was falling: the winds were nuking from the S, blowing snow all over the place, making driving up the canyon a little tricky. The avvy danger was cranked up to high and it didn't seem like the best day to go touring.
Starting from the Lady of the Snows, we slogged our way up Cardif in the near blizzard conditions. The trailbreaking was fairly hideous through the endless drifts. Fearful of the Bowl below the pass, we stopped in the final tree band at about 9,750'. The first part of the decent was a bit inverted, but as we got lower the blower powder took over.
The next couple of laps were the same sort of thing: the wind was filling in our uptrack, so we had to break each time. From the trees, we traversed W to ski East Hellgate which was considerably better that the first pitch. Each time we took it all the way to the road, walking the short distance back up to the Lady of the Snows. For the final lap, thankfully the wind had died down and we had a skin-track to follow! When we got down, the road was closed for bombing ahead of snow expected that evening. I just managed to get down the canyon in time to catch my flight.
With the bad weather the camera didn't even make it out of the car! 4,800' logged.