Teewinot, East Face

I admit that this was not an objective on my to-do list this Winter but I'm glad we gave it a go to travel North of the Grand, something I haven't done all season. With the road open to bikers it made making the summit a stronger possibility.

I texted Cody around 7pm on Saturday, "Thoughts on tomorrow?" His response, "Teewinot, bring your bike! Pick you up at 6:40am."

Sick, I'm in, for sure.

Sunrise

Full trunk, for 4.

Rendevousing with new partners Phil and Patrick at the Gros Ventre Junction we load all of our gear up and head for the end of the road. At certain times of the year, the Winter, the road is closed and groomed for cross country skiers. They opened it up early this year due to the low snowfall making an ascent of those northern of the Grand peaks easier.

Photo by Cody Pitz

Strapping my board to my bike and pedaling with my boots on with an icey road ahead, Teewinot came into view. I've heard things about Teewinot, none of those things being very good.

Ie Steep. Dangerous. Terrain traps. Steep. Avalanche prone. Big cliff. Has killed before.

I was a little hesitant to go up but at the same time pretty psyched to get up with a competent, strong group especially with one of the people already been up there, unfortunately though, has been bucked from the summit.

We made our way to the trailhead put our skis on and started hiking across the clearing through what looked like 2 inches of fresh. Making it to the initial base of it all we switched to booting, then back to skinning to hit the real start of the steep hiking. We started boot packing up, I looked at my Suunto watch and saw we were somewhere near 8000ft in elevation.

Post holing up the mountain, we changed leads every 30 minutes or so due to the fact that the snow came up to the waist at times.

This might be my only photo that shows how steep it really was, steep as hell.

5 hours later after booting up through ankle upto waist deep snow on a roughly 40 degree slope, we're at a point where we have to decide whether to keep going or not. With 400 or so feet left, we decide to bail on the summit. Clouds rolled in quick and, more so the reason, the top section was heavily baked and covered with blue ice with sugary snow under and the new snow on top.

Too dicey to keep going.

It sucks not to get a summit but there's always tomorrow to do that. Also, the fact that we all knew we were about to get the best turns of the year, we all felt fine with the idea.

The 4000 feet of turns: blower. Over the head, I can't see, it's choking me type of blower.