Day 1

We started early-ish Saturday morning, leaving the car around 5am without a real clue as to how early we would make it to the pass and have our camp set up. We surprised ourselves by blasting through the colchuck lake trail and arriving at the lake in an hour and 50 minutes with fully loaded packs. The lake was goregeous and we traversed the side, meeting a mountain goat along the way, before meeting the lower Colchuck glacier and transitioning to skins.

We were able to skin most of the way up the glacier, only switching to boots once the snow became firmer closer to 8k. We dropped into the basin on the back side of Banshee Pass and set up camp, watching parties put in booters on dragontail’s SW couloir and Colchuck. We eventually got bored with camp life, and decided to climb the south face of Colchuck, booting straight from camp. We had to navigate some rocky parts, Ben and I each taking different paths until we met back up on a steep headwall to punch our way through a small cornice. Once on the upper slopes, it was mostly flat walking up to the summit block, where we met a few parties that had climbed Colchuck’s NE couloir.

It was incredibly difficult to convince Ben to leave the summit, but I was getting concerned about late-day wet-loose avalanche potential. After a lot of prodding, we were skiing south back towards camp. We dropped a blind couloir that had been skied prior, and had to clear a small rocky cliff to progress to lower slopes. The snow was wet and moving, and luckily we were able to kick enough wet-loose onto the rocks around the cliff to make navigating it not so bad.

We moved down carefully, as we were discovering the snow was unstable this late in the day. We made sure not to ski directly over each other, which ended up being a good decision when I kicked off a large wet-loose that “splashed” off a giant boulder lower down. We made our way back down to camp and skied right to our front door.

I melted a bunch of water, ate a ton of food, and enjoyed the afternoon while I watched the storm roll in that was predicted for the evening. Ben wasn’t satisfied; however, and he eventually could bask on our camp rock no longer. He ran off, kicking a sloppy bucket-booter up Dragontail’s SW couloir, claiming that “If it was so nice, he’d ski it twice.”

Day 2

The night was mostly calm, with sporatic gusts of wind that would shake the tent violently. The wet socks I had shoved in my inner layers to partially dry – or at least distribute the wet – soaked me from the inside out, and my wet boot liners I used as a pillow soaked me from the outside in. When our alarms sounded, we sleepily agreed another hour of sleep would be best to allow time for the terrifying wind gusts to stop. I imagined booting up the icy couloir in the dark and having one of the gusts toss me off the mountain as I drifted back to a shallow sleep.

When it was eventually time to get moving, I squished my way back into my soaked socks, grunted my way back into my frozen boots, and prepared the sharp pointy things for battle. We started off from camp following Ben’s boot pack from the previous evening, but the deep bucket holes from the warm conditions prior had frozen which made travel in them awkward. Soon I started kicking my own steps, and we made good time up the couloir, making it to the top in under an hour in no hurry.

At the top, we found the sun and a rock scramble move that required a strange, tight down-climb and a step over no-fall-zone exposure. Ben got in position to do the move, but came back up when the skis on his pack catching on the rock made a move unacceptably dangerous. The face of snow directly over the couloir was steep, but downclimbable. I started down-swimming my way through already wet and loose granular snow. This south facing slope was already very warm, a bad sign since we would need to get back over this side on our return journey from the core. Ben skied by, making the steep face look easy, and I soon switched back onto skis to traverse under the Dragontail summit block.

We skinned east a bit and deposited our skis in some rocks before booting the last bit to the summit. I had to play devil’s advocate to even get Ben off the summit block to continue our journey after a short break. We were about to drop into the core and be very committed, and I wanted to hurry as much as we could, knowing that the longer we waited the warmer and looser the south faces got.

We dropped into the core and found sloppy, mashed potato snow after a few turns off Dragontail’s shoulder. As we dropped the final few hundred feet to the still-snow-covered lakes below, we descended into a cloud. The cloud hung in the enchantments core zone as we transitioned and started skinning clockwise around Isolation Lake. A good name. We were the only people in the core zone, and the peaks occasionally showed briefly as the fast-moving fog/cloud shifted and morphed. Eventually we climbed out and made our way up the north ridge of West Annapurna. It was a gentle ridge with a beautiful fall-line, and the north aspect would make for amazing skiing. We traversed under the West Annapurna summit and slid down to the shoulder towards the main summit. Up top, we dismounted and headed for the amazing summit block of Little Annapurna. Ben had talked it up, and it lived up to the praise. We could see I-90 and I mentioned how cool it was that we came from highway 2. We could also see the columbia river gorge way out east, and what looked like the Vantage area. Of course the enchantments were beautiful as well, and we admired Prusik and Temple accross the basin.

We unfortunately decided to cut our plans short and not ski Enchantment peak across the basin on the way back. We were running out of time and we both knew it. When our 10 minute timer ran out on the summit of Little Annapurna, we clicked back into our skis and skied great corn north-west, sadly avoiding the excellent fall-line north down the ridge. Ben had scoped a line on the way up that would take us along the south shore of Isolation Lake and allow us to cut out a lot of time skinning back around all the lakes.

We skied a traverse across Annapurna’s face, and Ben got speed greedy right when the snow got grabby and double ejected and splatted on the snow, and luckily his skis stuck in the snow next to him. We kept traversing, and along the shore of the lake I shouted at Ben to carry speed, as I didn’t want to follow and ski over him. As I traversed under the witches tower, I triggered a large D2 wet-loose avalanche that slid down the the lake. Ben and I hastily made our way to the south-east basin of dragontail to begin our climb out, agreeing that if things got too sketchy, we would turn around and ski down asgard.

Luckily, nothing bad happened, and we experienced stable but wet conditions as we marched our way up the solar oven of a snowfield. At the top, we found a trickle of water to refil a bit of our bottles, and we hurried our way across the remaining south face. As if they knew that there could be no worse time to fail than on the last skin of the day, my right skin wetted completely out and easily fell off my ski. This coincided with a blow-out of the skin track, and a mini-avalanche propagated down the long fall line below Dragontail as I regained my balance. I paused, tossed on a ski-strap to hold my skin in place, and only stopped one more time on way way across the face to add another when the single ski-strap-skin combo failed. Two did the trick, and I made it to the ridge where Ben waited for me. We couldn’t relax just yet, as we had the downclimb-scramble move standing between us and Pandora’s box.

Some climers came by, and we chatted with them while they did the move. It looked so easy without skis on their packs. When they left, I downclimed to the move, and as I stabbed my iceaxe in mud, kicked steps in loose rocky snow, I felt a strange resemblance to my experience on the Fuhrer finger last May. I stopped and talked to Ben about what we could do. Ben has some paracord, and we agreed on a plan to have one of us climb through the move, and the other climb up an easy section and lower the bags down to the col. I climbed through easily without the large pokey pack, and the pack lowering went smoothly. I got the opportunity to pick up Ben’s pack, and I was shocked at how heavy it was, and was very glad to have my ultralight skis with me.

We rejoiced in our relative safety, and now all we had to do was ski an awesome couloir to camp. Now I wasn’t so happy to have my ultralight skis with me. The snow on top of the couloir in the sun was soft and perfect, but I wanted to wait a bit for it to soften in the choke. After a few moments, we decided it could be good, and that we would ski it even if it wasn’t. I dropped first and the turns kept getting better. My skis skied beautifully, and I linked perfect corn turns down through the choke. Ben traversed over and dropped to cool chute down to camp, and I carried out the bottom of the couloir and whooped my way over as well.

We packed up, I strapped my skin back on for the final climb out of Banshee pass, and we skied great slushy corn down the Colchuck Glacier. We smoked a doobie in the trees by the lake, refilled on water fresh from the glacier, and started the long, crowded slog out and back to the car. 10 minutes from the car, a seemingly normal patch of trail blew out on me, and the full weight of myself, my pack, and my skis came down on a rock, splitting my knee open. I bandaged it up at the car, and rode to town to order two massive burgers. Plus curly fries.