Youngs Peak

I pulled into the Asulkan parking lot all by myself on Thursday night; Brenda had to work the next day, and much to her chagrin, I didn't want to give up on the idea of skiing on Friday. Nick would join me the next morning.

It was quite pleasant hanging out in the van; a bit of dinner, Tom Patey's "One Man's Mountains" providing a good read, various Marley brothers playing on the stereo. It was a real coup when I discovered the hip flask in the bottom of the food bin.

Nick and I made our way up the Asulkan Valley the next morning. There is still lots of snow but there were a few places where we were reminded that spring is well on its way.



We stopped for a bit of lunch at the hut and noticed a solitary figure up on the Youngs Peak headwall. As we were leaving we came across a video camera perched on the rocks outside the hut, filming, and deliberately aimed at the headwall. Kind of a neat idea. We idly wondered if it was Greg Hill up there.

Turns out that's exactly who it was. He stopped to say hello on his way back down to the hut. By the time we got to the summit of Youngs there he was right behind us again.



By this point in his day he had already climbed 9500' or something after doing 23,000' the previous day. We ultimately did a 6200' (1900m) and considered that to be a big day! The headwall was still holding good snow and we managed to squeeze in a couple of really nice runs each in between Greg Hill's numerous tracks.





On our way back down the snow transitioned from shallow powder into a tricky crust before finally softening into creamy spring-like corn by the time we were behind the Pterodactyl. It even held up well through the mouse trap as we dodged the avalanche debris back down into the valley.

A nice day out and one well worthy of being our last of the season if that does turn out to the case. There are some more photos here.