By: randosteve|Posted on: May 5, 2011|Posted in: Peak 11,226, The Tetons | 15 comments

I’m not totally sure what to make of the snowpack after a few days of warm weather followed by colder temps, but it sounds like a good combination to start to set things up a bit more. I think the higher elevations are probably still a bit touchy, but the lower elevation lines seem to be getting better.


Randosteve below “The Dirty Sanchez” on an aborted attempt on April 15, 2011.

With warmer temps on the way (maybe?), the melting of the ice on Jackson Lake is immanent, but Reed Finlay, Mitch Borocz and I wanted to make one last trip across it to check out a line we’ve all been eying before it melts out. It’s a pretty obscure descent and is called The Dirty Sanchez which has few different meanings and I’m not really sure what it’s relevance to this ski line is. Maybe someone can chime it and let us know?


On the approach below Peak 10,686.

This was mine and Reed’s third attempt at skiing the Dirty Sanchez this year. The first try ended up with us turning around due to sketchy snow conditions after climbing about halfway up it. My fourth turn triggered a slide that left us unscathed, but still with the Sanchez on our hit-list. On our second attempt, we decided to just drop-in from the top and skip climbing it, but too much new snow had us worried, so we salvaged the day by skiing some other lines in the area…which was fun, but still leaving us empty handed on our objective.


Mitch skins up Quartzite Canyon under mixed skies.

For this attempt, we launched from Colter Bay at 5am and although the skies were clear on the drive up to the lake, increasing clouds greeted us as we skied to the west shore under the twilight of the morning. We saw some very fresh bear tracks in the snow not too far up from the lake and it seemed like we just missed running into him. Sure glad that didn’t happen!!!


Looking down the line on one of two aborted attempts this year.

Some steep and firm skinning quickly brought us to the higher reaches of the canyon and I was glad I had my ski crampons. (I use these.  Be sure to check out the crampon locks…they work great!) The clouds continued to build in the sky, which bought us some extra time and kept us from sweating our butts off on the ascent.  Looking back, if it was a sunny day and with the current conditions, we probably would have been late for this descent, even though we were at the top of the line at 9:30am.


Reed drops in.

I was still pretty leery of the snowpack after my recent scare on Mount Saint John, but there’s no sense sitting around becasue of it and you really don’t what the conditions are until you get out there and start poking around.  When we finally got a visual on the Sanchez, it looked like it had slid naturally already (our guess is on last Sunday), which boosted my own confidence, not to mention the confidence of Reed and Mitch as well…so we decided to go for it.


The Dirty Sanchez.

Reed dropped in first and made a few tentative turns on the remaining hang-fire, but was soon below it and skiing on about 4-6” of new snow that had fallen in the past 24 hours. The Dirty Sanchez is comprised of a steep, triangular shaped face and the crux is at the bottom of it with a traverse to the skier’s right above some big cliffs to access a steep couloir that brings you onto the apron. The skiing was pretty good, some soft snow, some crusty snow, but it was pretty darn firm on the last turn above the traverse, which kept us on our toes.


Mitch skis the lower couloir with Reed above.

It felt good to get this one done and off the list, especially after the close call over the weekend. It looks like more moisture is on it way again to Jackson Hole, so the high country will probably be shut-down…again.