After climbing Cleos, my friend Luke called me and asked me to join him for a Cooke City mission. Having never been to Cooke City in the winter, I had to go. I didnt really know where to go, I just knew you could start skiing from where ever you slept (ex. me in the snow by the dump). Sunday morning was beautiful and sunny and we could see Republic Mountain and the Fin from camp. It looked perfect and straight forward so off we went. We swapped leads putting in the skin track through very punchy snow. About an hour or two and a couple thousand feet up, I got a bad feeling in my gut for no real apparent reason. The snowpack was stable, the weather was getting worse but still not bad, I wasnt physically or mentally taxed and there was no looming objective hazard above. Even still, every bone in my body wanted to turn around. But I kept going until we were on top of the first shoulder of the mountain, looking at the Fin face. We hung out there for a while to see if I could relax but I couldnt turn it off. Luke and I parted ways; he went up, I went down. Not an ideal scenario but this isnt the place to air dirty laundry. I made it back fine as did Luke so all's well that ends well right?
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| The Fin |
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| The snowpack totally changed right here and we had to plow/crawl through waist deep snow for maybe 50yds but it took us half an hour. |
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| Looking at the Fin from my high point. |
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| Epic turns (look closely, some people skied it early that day) |
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| The Cooke City snowpack is legendary. |
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| The wind and snow picked up big time by the time I got down. We skinned up and skied down the avy path in the middle of the photo up to the tree line. From there, you have to ski down a tiny ways then skin up the right side of the Fin. |
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