Gallery: YellowAsterButte08

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The Setup

This is the 3rd "snow cache" winter trip to Yellow Aster Butte. We placed gear there in the fall, came in, dug it out, and had a comfortable 4 days of camping and skiing.

Stephen made a movie of the whole trip. It's long so I just provide a download link. Very professional. More photos of this trip in Stephen's gallery.

Previous trips were in 2003 (no cache) and 2007 (snow cache).

Ski In

	Marie and Steve climbing through the forest.		Richard toping out in the alpine
	Uptracks are beautiful things		Richard looking for the bag we air dropped two days earlier. A foot of snow does a good job of hiding things.
	Digging for the cache placed last fall. At this point it was looking a little grim: couldn't find the dropped bag and we had reached the ground with no sign of cached gear.	View Media (movie)	Digging for the cache.
	Andrew and Serge arrived later due to gear complications in the morning.		Using photos taken after the drop I was able to direct Andrew to the dropped bag.
View Media (movie)	Andrew with the bag	View Media (movie)	Tom digging for gear. We were 5 ft to one side of where the gear actual was.

First Day.

	We decided to take a run first thing before the sun and warm weather glopped up the fine powder.
	Richard and I climbed to the top of the small peak above us to ski it's back side.		Other folks went around to a nice gully we skied the year before.
	Our runs in the basin on the north side.		Nice run through trees lower down.
	Climbing back up to do it all over again.
	Climbing out of the north side to return to camp
	Meanwhile the other group was enjoying powerdy runs down a broad ridge.		Steven on the uptrack.
	Evening in camp.

Second day

Due to the sun and warm weather all the south facing slopes were either mush or ice crust. Andrew and I climbed over the top to the north side while other's toured around the side. We found the snow on the north side was still excellent.

	Morning light.		Marie and Steve getting ready to bake blue berry muffins
	More nice runs on the back side.		Richard and Andrew at the base of the trees.
			Andrew heading home.
View Media (movie)	Richard on the bottom of what he declared was the best line he's ever skied.		Fully utilized.

Ski Out

	Packing
	Difficult skiing on the sun warmed snow.	View Media (movie)	Difficult hiking through the soft snow in a clear cut.

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Images © 2010 Tom Unger

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Page last modified:  Sep 05 19:07 2010  by  Tom Unger