Started at 7:30AM at the Rogers Pass Summit parking lot, and started climbing up Balu Pass. We went ~6km up the valley approach, and then started our ascent up Ursus Minor, crossing a couple of bowls and bushwacking through a few treed areas. All of us had explored this drainage before and skiied this part of the pass many times before, so we knew pretty much exactly where we were going with our day. You can see our route as follows, with the red being the ascent and the green being the descent:
Climbing the fields and trees was beautiful, the snow below 1800m was quite crusty but proved to get softer and softer as we ascended, eventually becoming blower up higher.
Crossing the upper snowfields.
The saddle in sight, with the scramble in the distance.
We all know this feeling haha. Reaching the end of our tour after climbing around 1700m, and reaching an elevation of around 3000m.
Starting the summit scramble after gearing up at the top saddle. This shit was scary. In hindsight we probably should have roped up for this one, but it was relatively short (200m).
Finishing the top scramble and climbing the ridge. There was some really scary traverses and facety parts on this ascent, but obviously it was too scary in most of these spots to bring out the camera haha.
After gearing up after the ridgewalk we skiied down to the Couli we had spent all day getting up to.
The view of the couloir we were about to ski. We climbed up on the left side of this image, and walked/skiied the ridge to drop in on the SE couloir on the right. This is the only image that does our scramble up the left ridge justice.
And finally the final descent!
https://www.newschoolers.com/watch/745189.0/SAUCY-COULOIR
Hope you enjoyed reading!
**This thread was edited on Dec 27th 2014 at 3:13:49pm
