A few weeks ago Aaron and I set off to ski tour to Wye ice. The Snow was icy Stastrugii (windswept bumps) and terrible ski conditions, The ice was on and further down the valley we could see a cool looking Pillar. With the lure of a new line we decided to ski down to the pillar, climb it and then continue down the valley and hitch back up to our car at the end of the day, thinking the snow conditions would be much nicer in the valley.
Aarons splitboard infront of our Pillar
Aaron not too happy since there is water pouring down the pillar, making it unclimbable
we decide it's too far back to the other ice so continue down the valley at first snowboarding but quickly terrain becomes too flat, so we try it in ski mode( not reccomended)
In the icy conditiond and the lack of edges I kept slipping Towards the stream bed in the steeped sided area's
Soon things go from bad to worse and Due to the rocks poking through the soft snow we can no longer"ski" so we have to Post hole through snow with Ice climbing gear and touring gear on our backs.
Never knowing how far you would go through was exhausting. Huge boulders, alpine shrubbery (damn you Spinifex) Sometimes it was so deep we had to crawl to make any progress. 3 hrs later we made it out to the Wye climbing area. Way too late in the day to get a ride back up remarkable we were rescued by our Lovely friends Shane and Nial, who went way out of their way to help us retrieve the car...You guys Rock!
It took me 3 days to recover, but no permanent damage done. A bit more adventure than we bargained on at the beginning of the day though
No comments:
Post a Comment