Then it snowed 2m in a week, and somehow the sun came out. Too much to do, not enough sun. Maddy, Bill, Cam, & I headed to the Joffre area with a long list of stuff we wanted to do.
Maddy & I were setting a pretty good pace since our excitement was comparable to a virgin about to get laid for the first time with a supermodel. We made it to the top of Anniversary glacier where there were some pretty fierce winds and went to seek shelter on Matiers NW face.
Bill found the wind to be too much and decided to go ski pow on the Anniversary glacier (not Bill):
The normal route up Matier's N ridge was exposed to the cold wind. It didn't seem appealing.
So we tried to cross the bergschrund at the bottom of the face. It was only a few feet wide, but had just a couple feet of light and fluffy snow covering it. I wasn't so stoked. It was cold, still kinda windy, I couldn't feel my toes, and we saw 3 others climbing the Aussie couloir in tropical sunshine.
Temptation prevailed. Lets go ski this:
Thanks to our solo Argentine friend, Jorge, the bootpack up the Aussie couloir was pretty quick. We had some snacks in the sunshine, then headed for the summit.
Ski off the summit:
We skied onto the face just to lookers right of the huge cornice, and skied a few turns of wicked pow while the wind whipped it back up in our faces. Then we had to side step through the rockband, and ski steep pow:
We went skiers left off the spine (since we were unsure of the twisting couloir), and skied more steep pow
We traversed the glacier and skied a slightly bony and steep slide path, but it quickly turned back to this for the next 1000m:
As the light faded we skied some cruisy pow down to the valley. I'm kinda glad we turned around on Matier. That was worth the wait.
