Nov 11, 2019, Muir snowfield 11/11/19

Belated TR from November 11th. Pulled together a crew of 6 to ski the Muir snowfield. Having mostly skied alone, this was a very nice change of pace. New friends!

We had beautiful weather for the hike/skin ascent. We started skinning around 7500'. My buddy from Boston was a champ skinning for the first time in alpine boots, borrowed skis, and skins that desperately need to be re-glued. He ended up booting up the last 800 feet on ice in the world's heaviest boots and I am SO PROUD. We heard a serac fall (from the terminus of the Kautz, I think) and watched one of the biggest ice avalanches I've ever seen.

"Summit" beers were had at Muir, and we began the descent around 3:30pm. One new friend had some trouble with malfunctioning bindings on a brand new setup. He lost skis a few times until we figured out that the bindings were set too large for his boots and he kept twisting the boot out one each turn. We burned some daylight attempting a field repair with ski straps. No one had the necessary screwdriver to adjust Dynafit bindings. We missed the corn/soft snow window, so the ski descent was smooth but icy. The sunset was gorgeous, probably because everything is 1000x better on skis. We hiked out by headlamp. Back to the cars at 6:30.

The good:
Sunshine! New friends! Cool ice avalanche! Beer! Sunset! Time on skis! Good teamwork and troubleshooting to fix a binding!

The bad:
New friend almost lost a ski forever. Bindings improperly set and wouldn't hold a boot securely. Limited time to adjust said bindings (side note - I will start carrying a multitool with a torx bit).

The ugly:
Friend from Boston had the best/worst day of his life.