After we crossed the bergshrund at the base of the couloir, I dumped the rope among other gear, as the upper scrund on the east face was completely avoided when going up from the couloir, the fall line is sufficiently uninterrupted that the glacier doesn’t break up. It is a gorgeous couloir, with a relatively mellow angle and lots of width, and very cool pinnacles choking it in at the top. We woke up at 4am and started up the glacier toward the south couloir. But we made er, finally finding a suitable campsite at 8pm. Due to it being quite late in the day, the snow was sketchy, so we had to make some less than efficient scrambly moves on rock above some fatter chutes of snow we felt were too hot to touch. Getting the skis and boots off the back was by far the highlight of the day, and we skinned up 500m before cutting back in the direction of the cliffy slidepaths and the south glacier after we had reached good terrain for traversing above the treeline. So we continued on upstream on the road, until after 12km of relatively expedient travel on roads, we punched upward into another set of slidepaths. 300m of cliffs with the occasional ice fall separated us from sufficiently easy ground above. I was pretty sure that the avalanche paths fall line from the south glacier was too rugged of terrain to bother utilizing for the access, and for once today I was right. Noting it for later, we walked up the remnant of a logging road on more bare ground. Then we continued up the river bank to the old road crossing, where there is a good size downed tree crossing the river, just a hundred meters downstream of the removed bridge. The crossing ended up being quite hard to find, and pretty sketchy, but we made it without loss of gear or man.
We decided to make our crossing of the river at a swift section further downstream than the site of the removed bridge, thinking there would be ample opportunities in the rocks and driftwood. Even once it does melt, the rockfall on the road will be quite a task to clear, as the frequent rains this winter have allowed more to fall off than usual I suspect, and then be transported onto the road efficiently by avalanche debris. As I suspected, the snow only started at the canyon. So, we hoisted heavy pack with skis, boots, overnight, and technical gear and started plodding up. So we decided to just walk from there, it was 7km and 400m of gain from where I expected to stop, but there was no other way without a chainsaw.
#Bryce ski plus#
We started to saw through the tree in a chunk small enough to pull, and even found a new use for the adze on ice axes, but in the end it was going to be too much work with the rudimentary tools at our disposal, plus there was another log, equally as massive just down the way. The remainder still stuck out too far though, and the base was interlocked in other trees so it could not rotate out of the way. After quadrupling it up with another strap, we had enough strength to pull off a shattered chunk of the tree after undermining it with my snow saw. We started by tying a strap to the first big tree and giving a pull with the truck, which only snapped the strap. The next obstacle would eventually prove to be too great, at a cutblock there was some large blown down trees. We rolled the rocks off the other side and continued on. However, the first obstacle was at a bright, sunny cutbank, which was littered with fallen rocks and even a few trees that slid down, roots and all.
I was confident the snowline would be sufficiently advanced this year to drive nearly into Rice Brook Canyon, where I expected the steep rocky north face above the road to choke it out with debris of rockfall and snow. The road before the causeway to Chatter Creek has improved substantially since the last time I was up, making for great driving. But I had suspicions that it could be much harder than anticipated. On paper, it seemed like it should be an easy day to crush out, we only needed to get to the bottom of the south glacier and set up a camp, only 7km and 1000m. I was a little bit unsure whether or not we needed to get up early the first day. Bryce’s east face/south couloir from the air. Mt Bryce is mostly known by skiers for Chris Brazeau’s awesome bold descent of its north face, but the standard mountaineering route is also a worthy goal. and I headed up Bush River with the intent of skiing Mt Bryce’s south couloir/east face.
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