This past weekend, Peter Snavley (Denver, CO) and I met up Saturday morning in Ridgway, CO for a ski mountaineering attempt on majestic Mount Sneffels (14, 150′), in the San Juan Mountains.

Our planned route was a climb and ski of the popular ski mountaineering testpiece the ‘Snake Couloir’, but we found an unbelieveable amount of red Utah dust has brought early summer snow conditions to the San Juan Mountains early this year..

After some reconnassaince work on current snow conditions, we made an educated guess that the ‘Snake’ was probably not that skiable, but definitely climbable, and opted for the higher Yankee Boy Basin trailhead approach and one of my favorite tours, the “Tour de Sneffels” route….a circuitous route from the South side of Sneffels over to the North, up to the summit and back down the South side. A true mountaineering day with stellar lines and a cool, remote and committing feel to it.

By mid-afternoon we donned skins and packs and headed up into the upper reaches of Yankee Boy Basin and were immediately blown away by the prevalance of this winter’s Moab sand/dust storms on the snowpack and how fast it has made snow conditions change from spring corn snow to summer neve.

Not being inspired to ski in Yankee Boy Basin, because of the sand layer, we opted for a late afternoon climb up to Lavender Col (13, 500′) where we decided to pitch an alpine camp and spend the evening with an incredible view of the surrounding mountains high above the tiny town of Ridgway.

After a cold night (low of 25 degrees), we awoke to a beautiful sunrise and an interesting dawn ski down the East Couloir Route around to the base of the Snake Couloir, in which Pete’s split-board was coming unhitched due to the increased torque on it from the runnelled and grippy snow.

Once in the Snake Couloir our skepticism of a possible ski descent were immediately confirmed as it proved to be a mixed bag of re-frozen spring snow, compacted and runneled summer snow, neve, and some alpine ice thrown in for good measure. 

While certainly skiable to the incredibly dedicated, due to conditions and technical split-board issues, we opted to summit with our skis and board and head down the much more appealing looking Standard Route and back to our high camp at Lavender Col.

A quick rappel into the couloir and we were greeted with a surprisingly good run of 500′ of steep and exposed couloir corn skiing and riding back to camp.

From here it was a quick packing up of camp and then a full-on combat skiing mission of Us vs. the Moab sand layer back to the car. While we won the battle against the sand (barely) it was more akin to skiing on the Great Sand Dunes possibly then on spring snow. Maybe some spf infused wax would be a better option next time.

Overall, it was  great ski mountaineeirng tour of an incredible mountain, and a fitting note for me to call it quits on for the ski season…humbly defeated by somewhat inhospitable ski conditions…..great alpine mountaineering conditions though…

Thanks Pete for a fun and final capstone experience to another memorable ski season. See ya again next year.

—Jayson Simons-Jones (Guide)

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Alpine Mountaineering, General, Skiing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.