Snow Cave Camping

It's been about two months now, but Dad and I took an overnight snow-camping expedition into the Middle Fork as a training excursion for Denali. Our goal at first was to do a traverse of of the Great Bear Wilderness, summitting 4 peaks in the process. However, it took us longer to get to the first pass than we thought and the travel of the ridge was excruciatingly slow. So we bailed on the traverse, went and dug a snow cave, made some dinner, and slept soundly. The next morning we had at least 2 inches of new snow on our camp and visibility was very poor. We went up on the side of Mt. Penrose as high as we felt comfortable with the wind slab potential and skied back to camp. Then we stumbled back down the valley, barely able to see in off-white, ping-pong ball conditions. Down lower the fresh snow was super unstable and we fled back to the trees avoiding sliding snow as much as possible.

Trip in review: no traverse, horrible skiing conditions, but a fantastic overnight trip to prepare for our Alaska expedition.

Dad on the gnarly ridge heading toward Nyack Mountain.
The cornices were bad enough that travel was too slow to continue
our intended traverse.

Snuggled up in a puffy waiting hot water for dinner.

Digging the snow cave.

Home away from home for the night. It was a lot warmer and less wet
than I had always pictured snow caves. Just one of those things: you
never know unless you try something.  

Toasting good times, warm clothes, and hot co!

Trying to ski on the inside of ping-pong ball...even the trees were
difficult and after the trees you can see there was nothing to break
up the terrain.