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.

Checking out the snowpack about half way up.

 

Yeuhi pulling up onto the glacier, proper.

This middle finger thing was somehow a running joke of the trip.

We skinned about half way up the debris pile visible above before we started seeing a lot of signs of sluffing, giving us our cue to beat feet. Realistically, we were up there inadvisably too late.

The snow was spectacularly bad. Skiing through the bowl below Tower 3 Chute a few days ago had been bad, but this may have been even worse. The lack of a solid freezing pattern meant that the snow was virtually unworkable wet, soft, mank.

A photo of me skiing the exit run. Makes it look ok, but it was rough skiing.

We got back to camp readily enough, and spent the afternoon lounging around and farting. We also got rained on at a couple points.

Drying damp gear. Had to scramble at a couple points to get it in out of the rain.

Also, BEAR! A bear was hanging around the camp, eating, apparently, dirt. It knew we were there and didn't act aggressive. We just made a lot of noise and made sure it kept its distance. It didn't have any interest in us, or our gear or cooking area, but it definitely was in no hurry to get away. It was hanging around our area for at least half an hour before it moseyed off over the ridge to the north.

Like the night before, we were in the tents around 7, ready for an early wakeup. Earplugs and a bandana over the eyes are great for this.