Chair Peak, Snow Lake Environs

With the varied conditions reports, we decided to head towards Source Lake, then make a decision on the direction. Pineapple Pass sounded enticing, but we followed the sun, and headed up towards the Chair Peak basin (thank you to the party/parties who put the skin track in). Once there, we stuck with our mission to enjoy as much of UV light as possible, and booted up one of the couloirs on the right (towards Snow Lake).

Great lunch spot with amazing views, but windy as heck so we cut the sunbathing rather short. Entertained an option to drop down to the west end of Snow Lake, but observed some minor slabs, and weren't sure how much the lower part of that gully would be filled in, so instead we started skinning along the ridge towards Snowlake Divide, hoping to drop into the couloir that would spill us onto a nice SE-facing slope we harvested a couple of weeks ago. The col didn't have enough snow for our liking so we navigated our way to the east end of Snow Lake to enjoy some amazing turns in the upper portion of the descent (8" of soft on bulletproof crust), and OK turns closer to the lake (still plenty of soft, but with an army of death cookies along the way).

Looks like the Snow Lake crossing is in (seemed still a little sketch to me, but the track was laid fairly close to the shore, and it looked like lots of people used it, so there's that).

Then simply up and down to Source Lake, and on to Alpy. The Source Lake exit got a lot better since two weeks ago.

Overall, we found the conditions stable, though on steeper slopes skinning proved difficult with the new snow sluffing off the crust easily. Amazing blue bird day in December.