Spring in Jackson Hole #4: rainy wakeup, initial excursion

The alarm clock beeped at 2 AM, but Alex and I are already awake. Unfortunately, there is a pattering noise on the fabric of his tiny mountaineering tent which does not bode well. We call out to Yeuhi, sleeping under a tarp outside.

"Yeuhi, what do you think?"
"Fuckin' RAIN!"
"Should we give it a half hour?"
"Awright"

After saying that, the rain ramped up for about 15 min, then started tapering off and by about 2:30 it was stopped. Green light, ok. We got up, recovered our food from the bear cans (and our overflow bear bag), and fired up the stove. Around this point, it started sprinkling again. We stared at the stove, waiting for our water to boil for oatmeal and coffee.

(As a side note, this campsite had more bear and moose poop than I had ever seen, it was absolutely everywhere. One literally could not swing a dead cat without reaching some. In other words, we definitely waited for the water to boil.)

Sprinkling on and off. Drink the coffee. As we are eating oatmeal, the rain gets steady. Then turns to hail. Shit. We look at each other, and decide that this is not likely to work out. We decide to can it and go back to bed.

Real great that that happened after getting the coffee into our system. We crawled back into our sleeping bags, trying not to spread the wetness from our gear around the tent. I personally didn't sleep too great after that, but eventually fell asleep, and got up well after sunup. We had breakfast, and obviously were not going high on the mountain, but we decided to skin up and see how things looked.

Morning sun on the Skillet Glacier, from our cooking area.

Alex, happy to finally be on his skis.

Spring in Jackson Hole #3: approach to Skillet Glacier

After we skied Apres Vous, we knew we had time to make it up to the National Park Visitor Center, where we could talk to a ranger and make plans for the next stage of the trip. It was a tough decision, as we got some tempting views up Avalanche Canyon, but we decided to stick with our original goal of the Skillet Glacier on Mt. Moran. The rangers gave us lots of good info about camping and skiing options in the park in general, as well as a fascinating exchange with a college-age ranger who, as we were discussing our plan to do a hiking approach to the Skillet via Bearpaw and Trapper Lakes said something like:

"Trapper Lake, oh yeah, there are tons of bears up there."
"Sounds like we should be sure to bring bear spray."
"Yeah, if you have bear spray around, yeah, you should probably bring that..."

...Never mind what he would recommend if we didn't have bear spray already...like we shouldn't move heaven and earth to get some.

Loading up in the parking lot the next morning.