Bloody Couloir
I’m definitely a sucker for road lines and this one in particular catches your eye pretty easily when driving across the Eastern Sierra.
We’re definitely in between the period where you can skin the whole thing or drive surprisingly high up near Laurel Lakes, so a bit of skis on skis off today
The line pictured above KJ - we skied skier’s left of both rock bands in the couloir
Dealing with some undulating terrain and patchy snow.
A couple ways up but we booted up the large shaded snow slope on the left to gain the final ridge.
Weird rock formation
Looking back at the town of Mammoth
Looking at the Minarets far away
Yeesh, definitely a bit overloved.
This made for some interesting skiing given that we also dropped in slightly early on the firm side.
But the souths were baking so hot that the snow got super mushy on this aspect; an interesting strategy pictured here versus postholing
The White Mountains looking significantly less white than when we started our trip a couple weeks prior
Probably around 9000 feet of vertical relief from the valley floor
Red Slate Mountain, looks fun to ski but I know it’s trickier than it seems
Glad we skied this when we did because it ended up ripping about a week after as seen in Cody Townsend’s video
Notes
- This was probably ~11 miles and ~5500 feet of vertical gain in a little under 7 hours.
- Would be fun to ski some of the other aspects of Bloody next time or link up with something else while you’re already here.