May 1-2, 2004, Colchuck-Dragontail

The plan was to hike in and ski the Colchuck glacier on Saturday then ski Aasgard Pass and Dragontail on Sunday...snow conditions were interesting, but the weather and scenery were great.  I had heard before that the approach to Colchuck once the spring melt was well under way made for a lot of post holing hell, but this trip had been on the 'to-do' list for a while so why not give it a try.
Patchy, inconsistent snow up to Colchuck Lake...running shoes on the feet carrying the ski gear was the best option..unfortunately for me I had yet to mentally switch gears to 'spring tour mode' and didn't even consider bringing approach footwear (I figured the birkenstocks I had in the car wouldn't cut it as approach shoes)...hiking in T1's just makes one stronger, right?
Once at Colchuck Lake we finally put the skis on the ground, though there were more than a few off-again on-again with skinning on dirt episodes to reach halfway around the lake, at this point we decided to take our chances with skiing the lake.  It saved a lot of time, though my partners having a better body weight-ski area ratio managed just fine, but my right ski decided it wanted to go swimming and broke through the ice...after that it was a bit of a blur and shuffling along as quickly as possible for the far side of the lake.
After dumping the bivy gear we skinned toward the Colchuck glacier. By 3pm we still had a ways to go and we all started to worry about the hazard of point releases...though the skis weren't sinking too deep into the mashed potatoes, one could punch a ski pole almost 2' into the snowpack.   After 2000' of slushy turns and a fair number of cinnamon rolls released down the slope we were back at our bivy rock at the lake where we lounged for the rest of the day and hoped the snow would refreeze overnight.
A warm breezy evening with increasing cloud cover kept the snow from freezing so we skinned up Aasgard Pass through thick snow, though not as bad as Colchuck the day before. By 10:30 we were at the top of the snow creek glacier maybe a couple hundred feet from the top of Dragontail but with the snow quickly getting worse and the sun cooking the slope we deskinned and started down...a couple slow,creeping point releases and some big rollers were kicked off by all of us, but we were back the lake by 11am surveying the damage we'd done to Aasgard Pass...between our tracks and the debris we did a pretty good job of messing up the slope.
Skis back on the packs we opted to stay on solid ground on the hike out instead of the lake...though I did manage to punch through the snow into knee deep swamp water on the hike out...water-logged T1's on the hike out were even more fun than dry T1's on the way up.
so, the turns were not all the plentiful and they were not easily come by, but we all had some good laughs and it was great to finally see the Enchantments in the springtime.