My Backyard: Stairs Gulch

I have been wanting to ski Stairs Gulch before too much of the bottom melted out so I asked some friends if they wanted to do it this weekend. Aaron Kennard was able to come and brought his friend Jentry. Since Jentry was on megawatt's he suggested we go ahead and do a lap once we got to Bonkers. The snow on Bonkers was still good and a lot of fun. We were back up to the summit above Stairs around 10. I thought I'd be home early but didn't know I was in for the longest descent of my life! We had great snow up high and then hit something called the icefall - a 60 degree ice chute - that apparently some people just ski down and quickly stop at the bottom. The problem was there was a ton of avalanche debris at the bottom of this and really icy above. Seeing Jentry struggle as he neared the icefall I tried to go down a different chute but the edges of the chute to get to the apron were just faceted snow on top of slippery slabs of rock so I was unable to safely go that way. I booted back up and found the handline I had seen in pictures and eventually made my way over to that. Jentry was down below the small cliff bands and said it looked like the rope didn't go long enough. I figured it would because I had seen a picture of it being used but couldn't remember the direction they had gone with the rope. Rather than test it I booted back up around to the original route Jentry took that now seemed like the best option and down climbed a tree/evergreen bush type thing that I was very grateful for. Basically this one section took us 45 minutes or more. Lower down the couloir there were soccer sized avalanche debris that proved unskiable so we walked over that and finally had some great corn skiing down below. Since I was now late rather than early Aaron and I ran down the trail once the snow ended to drive up to his car at Broads where we started. It's always fun watching peoples' faces when you come back to a road with skis on your back and whippets in hand when other people are going on summer hikes and wondering where the heck you just came from.

Bonkers (all the good pictures of me are from Aaron's dslr)