LEFT TO RIGHT Marie following the shadows midday on the last day of the trip. Marie and Francisca drop into the final run of the trip, leading our crew of six off the ridge, into the trees, and back to the hut. WE KNEW IT WOULD BE a big day. Birds chirped through still air, a particularly curious red crossbill greeting our early awaken-ing. Coffee on, water boiled for breakfast, we were out the door by 7:30, greeting Timmy Taussig, and his friend Mark, who had departed well before sunup to join us. The goal: Ride the high lines as much as we could. So we set out on our skintrack from the day prior, a half hour to the lake, another hour to the bench, for snow-test laps at treeline. The snow felt stable. Soon, Fran and Marie were perched atop the tongue of the moraine. Fran went first. She dropped from the top, pick-ing up speed and arcing long, confident turns before dipping out of sight toward the lake below, lost in perfectly pitched powder bliss. Then Marie, and Timmy and Mark from up higher, moving to the toe of the glacier, following the light around the basin and cycling laps into the afternoon. It’s hard to convey the feeling of these rare days when it all lines up. The snow, the people, the terrain, the stability—you spend a winter chasing it and are lucky if you land on a few of these per-fect days by the end of it. So, when they arrive, you need to take full advantage—and that’s what we did. It’s also amazing how much terrain you can cover by foot in a day with a slow and steady approach. By 4 p.m. we’d laid tracks across most of this high amphitheater, tagging each slope in suc-cession, following the sun. But Marie still had one line in mind: a short, steep wall of spines, in a hanging bowl just out of sight, back toward the hut. Pausing for a snack, we assessed everyone’s comfort level with the plan and the best route to get there. With the whole team on the same page, we dropped one by one from the top of the moraine, this time traversing to the far side of the upper bowl, skinning across a subtle bench under manageable ex-posure. And another half hour’s shuffle away, the wall appeared. It wasn’t a big face, maybe 150 vertical feet, but it was as steep as anything that could hold snow. Marie and Fran set a skintrack to the adjacent ridge, then clamored into position. Just those two would ride this line as the rest of us waited below in a boulder field, assisting their positioning over the radio. This time Marie went first. Before dropping, she radioed, “Are you ready for some Jeremy Jones shit?” It was designed to get a laugh out of the crew, and it worked. She cut in on her toe edge, exposing rock under a thin snowpack, cut to her heels above her sluff, and pointed it off a small drop, exiting clean. Fran dipped around a cor-nice onto a steep panel, carving two quick turns into the shadows. “Adrenalinic,” she called it, and it fit—the pair was riding high. Then, a release—Marie and Fran led the charge down a ridge into the trees, all six of us bouncing through golden evening light. Then a gully, pillow poppers to the valley floor, a quick transition to the hut. Departing under falling darkness, there was no rush to get home. 064 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.4: Page 64
