Got up to Pinkham Notch on Saturday to take advantage of the good weather and rapidly decreasing snow. This was day 40 for me which I am pretty proud of. This is the most I have skied in a season so far in my life.
I woke up at 4:45 to texts from my ski partner that they the messed up their foot mountain biking the day before. Also texts from their wife telling me to not guilt trip them into coming lol. I went up anyway since I figured the bowl would be packed so I wouldn’t really be alone. I got up to pinkham notch visitor center at 8am, parked in the overflow lot across the little bridge and started hiking up. It was sunny beautiful morning in the 40s when i started. The TRT was bare until the last .2-.3 miles. I threw some microspikes on to help with traction and made it up to the bowl in roughly an hour. I was pretty happy with that time.
I booted up right gulley with crampons. Once you got up higher in the gulley the snow was pretty firm. Maybe 2inches of sun cooked snow on top of harder snow/ice. There were a good amount of people with no crampons or axes scaring **** out of me. I topped out of the gulley onto the lion’s head ridge. Met a couple of college kids and we went up to the summit. It was beautiful up top. There was literally zero wind which was a weird thing to experience.
A quick aside: I also saw paragliders flying above us while climbing to the summit of Washington. It turns out that I knew some of them! Last week I went and skinned up Baron’s Run on Mittersill. I met and toured with some guys who were paragliders. They were grilling tostinos pizza rolls on the side Barons when I left them for the day.
After tuck’s I stopped by a white mountain ski co and spoke with one employees who was paragliding too. He told me that one of the guys was the tostinos pizza roll man which cracked me up.
Back to my story… The college kids and I headed back down towards the bowl.
The goal was to get setup on the snow fields above the lip and traverse across to the chute on the lookers left of the bowl. As I made it to the snow fields I met a guy heading for the summit. He told me that the chute was skied out and was really firm in the afternoon shade. Probably 10-12 people fell badly in the chute that day.
I wasn’t feeling great and I decided to take the easy way down. I stayed above the snow and rock hopped to left gulley for my decent. The top was firm and skied off. I took some mediocre jump turns on the head wall and then had some fun skiing the moguls down below.
To hike out I walked in a bit of a konga line to Hojos but after that it was smooth sailing to the parking lot. It was solid day up on rock pile!
