A Tale of Two Octobers
- edwardsbushnell
- Nov 30, 2022
- 4 min read
It was the worst of snow, it was the utmost mediocrity of snow. It was the fall of despair, it was the late fall of slightly less despair. It was the epoch of lazy-ass writing in the form of cheap Dickensian rip-offs. We had no snow at all. We had all the snow we...oh, f*** it. You get the point.
October is a waiting game. The early part of the month is generally free from precipitation. Then, most years, just around the end of the month the mountains get their first significant snowfall.
But every once in a while, that significant snowfall never materializes, and I end up hiking into the grey depths of Garnet Canyon for some crappy turns on solid ice dotted liberally with rock.
And it's gotten worse over the last several years. See, e.g., my September post. (Unless you are one of the two people who have viewed it since its posting six weeks ago. I know I said I didn't care if people read the blog or not, but come on.)
This year I had plans to be out of town October 19-27. And being a perpetually glass-half-empty kind of guy, I couldn't stop worrying about whether something might happen to prevent me from getting back into town in time to make the late-October turns. COVID outbreak? Nuclear War? Flaming malaise?
So in the early morning hours of October 16 I started up Garnet Canyon. It was another gorgeous morning, about six weeks into an extended Indian summer which was wonderful for recreation but terrible for our already sorry precipitation state.
I knew from August and September skis that the usual late-summer/early-fall snow patches were either gone or in horrible shape, but it still was a shock as I hiked into the canyon. The Cave Couloir, my go-to late season snowfield for the last two decades was almost gone; what remained was a dirty, grim lightbulb-shaped ice-patch dead ending into a rock field. A few hundred feet above, the Spaulding Peak snowfield was so dirty it took me a minute to realize I was actually looking at some form of frozen water.
I'm not a fan of the South Fork of Garnett Canyon. I find the endless scree-fields with no real semblance of trail more tedious than challenging (or in any case, the tedium exacerbates the challenge), and I rarely get up and down without a few tumbles and twisted ankles. But on this day I figured since I put in the effort to get through the endless screefields, I might as well maximize the time I had up there. Gaining the saddle between the Middle Teton and South Teton quicker than I often do, I decided to ditch my ski gear and make a bid for the Summit of the Middle Teton.
From the summit I has a clear view of the snowfield I planned to ski, and it looked awful. Worse, it looked terrifying. A steep shot of several hundred vertical feet of pure ice. New snow clung to parts of the ice, but at that steepness I figured the snow would slough off when I made my first turn, leaving me exposed on the ice. (This wasn't mere supposition; that very experience happened to me on that very snowfield in September, 2020).
So after retrieving my ski gear I started back down the South Fork of Garnet Canyon to a snowfield at the base of Cloudveil Dome, in my opinion the only feasible ski I found in the canyon.
The skiing was mostly on a smooth cover of snow that had fallen in the past month or so, but that snow had frozen hard to the old ice. But while glacier ice is like a tilted lake where holding an edge is out of the question, this snow was firm and scratchy, but edgeable. I was even able to get a good rhythm for the first dozen turns, until I was forced to slalom around rogue rockfall. Would I go so far as to say I enjoyed it? For a few seconds, yes, it was enjoyable.
I try to ski at least 1,000 vertical feet every month, but allow a bare minimum of 500 feet if the conditions are particularly dangerous or challenging. Although today's ski didn't really qualify as either, it certainly wasn't good enough to justify any more than three runs of about 250 vertical feet. Also, by now I was feeling the effects of the superfluous Middle Teton Summit, and I knew I had several hours of scree-hopping and hiking to get back to the car. I didn't quite make it to the trailhead before nightfall.
The next week my family and I went out of town. We came home to winter: temperatures in the teens and a few inches of snow in the valley. More snow up high. So twelve days after my Garnet Canyon excursion I parked my car on the top of Teton Pass for an early season ski tour. The snowpack was certainly thin and the snow had a bit of crust and no base, but it was snow. Edgeable, turnable, soft and forgiving snow. (The rocks underneath weren't as forgiving, so I definitely was moving slowly.)
My tour out to Mount Elly, with a quick lap in Avalanche Bowl, and over to Thanksgiving Bowl, was quick and fairly nondescript; a tour I might do a dozen times in a year, usually in far better conditions. But the contrast to twelve days previous was striking. While the last several Teton trips were full-on adventures, hours of approach for a handful of sub-par turns, here was actual snow right from the car. In 90 minutes I logged more turns than I had in the last 90 days. It was...pleasant.
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