Bloody Couloir

Skied Bloody Couloir via Sherwin Creek Road from 395. Can drive to about ~1/2 - 3/4 miles from the Laurel Lakes Road with a low clearance vehicle - but the snow on the road there is melting fast (notable melting even over the course of our day). After one or two discontinous patches of snow on the road, we were quickly on skins for the rest of the road. We followed the majority of the sled tracks above the summer road, but our route required a short section of talus to get into the main drainage.

We started skinning a little after 8am and snow was still solidly frozen up. We had frozen conditions for most of the way to Laurel Lakes (~10,000), which we reached around 11.

Snow in the Bloody was generally still wintery. In places (especially more westerly aspects) there was a bit of a breakable sun crust with graupel underneath to at least 11,000. The main gut of the chute was mostly supportable wind buff though. Ski penetration on the climb was about 5cm. We switched over to booting around 11,500 at one of the prominent rocks in the chute. Boot penetration was variable, with some places having soft snow with 25+cm of boot penetration, others having only 1-3 cm. Crampons were nice in a couple places but definitely not necessary - even in the hardest wind-polished snow you could still get a good kick in.

Wind was fairly calm most of the way up, but as soon as we gained the ridge (~1:30 pm) we got a moderate SW wind. I dropped directly off the summit on the hanging snowfield above the rocks in the bloody - this was good, soft wind buff. The main chute had similarly good wind buff, with a fairly consistent surface and not much ski penetration, but no breakable crust.

The snow on the lower apron in the sun had started to warm a bit at 2pm, but overall was still wintery in character at least on N. aspects down to 10,000. Below that we started to get into solid melt-freeze snow; ~9000-9500 NE was very much solar affected, although it was good corn skiing at a bit after 2pm. We had good corn skiing on mostly NE aspects down to about 8,000, at which point the snow became very sticky for the rest of the way down and out.