Monday's weather was terrible, so we relaxed in the hut and read some books.
Tuesday's weather was better
So we skinned up not quite as frozen slopes towards the Boomerang Glacier in what seemed like optimistic skies.
But then we climbed back up into the clouds
We skied off the summit of Sessel in a monotone world, void of any shadows or horizon. I face-planted off a 3 ft. wind-form onto ice. That was fun. We traversed the ridge for quite a ways, trying to find a way through the cornice that guarded the majority of this Ridge. We found a big wind cirque that opened up onto an upper face. I had wanted to ski off the E sub-summit, but I thought it was still far away. We skied out onto the face. Looking down the fall line, I saw mostly white everywhere, some blue ice, and the faint hints of a schrund under the cliffs I was standing on... maybe not this way.
We traversed a bit more, changing aspect slightly. This bergschrund looked friendlier. So we skied some nice powder as the skies started to open up. I stopped and turned around to watch Maddy ski, and what did I see... the sub-summit I had wanted to ski in the first place.
Screw that. I wasn't turning around to dick around with some BS in the clouds. So we skied down the rest of the glacier. Nothing too steep, but a nice pitch for carving some turns in May powder.
We skied down a few hundred meters at a time. Trying to wait for sucker holes to give use depth perception. I managed to get an okay video of Maddy skiing down beside the seracs on the lower part of the glacier.
At the bottom we snacked and waited for some sun so we could atleast see the route we skied. This was the best it got
A quick & windy skin led us back to a col for a relaxing ski back to the hut in some isothermal mush.
On Wednesday, the morning was beautifully clear, so we decided to try a link-up. We started skiing up towards Sugus from the hut on some nicely frozen slopes.
We crossed over onto the glacier to the N of Sugus and skinned up to it's summit ridge. By this point clouds had filled the valleys and things were starting to look more urgent. The moment we got up onto the ridge, I looked South and took this picture right before the clouds swallowed us up again
We sat on the summit for a little while, hoping that the clouds would go away. They didn't. So we decided to ski a 3000 ft. corn run down the SE side in incredibly flat light. Maddy skis down this SE facing glacier
And me
Once down in the valley, we looked up at Hemionus. We had wanted to ski it's N ridge, but the clouds were pretty thick around it. It was warm in the valley and I felt lazy. So we skied some isothermal mush back to the hut.
Thursday morning was super cloudy, then the clouds lifted a bit, but everything was still pretty nasty looking. So we had another hut day. I caught 2 of the 4 mice, we found the outhouse, dug a tunnel for wood, and ate as much as we could. If Friday sucked, we were going to go out.
Friday sucked. We skied out in a bit of a drizzle on some isothermal BS. The 40 degree side-hilling that Andy had mentioned in his TR sucked the most. Luckily the beer we had buried was just barely poking out of the snow when we got back to the car, making it quick to retrieve and quick to refresh our battered egos from the tree mush death march. I'd left the light on in the car, so we had fun bump starting it on the soft-soiled logging road.
