The conversation went something like this:

That’s how we ended up motoring over the pass in the wee hours, with starry skies above. Storm?  What storm?

As it turned out, we hit it just about perfectly.  A shallow coat of new powder covered the skintrack into Garnet Canyon, making route-finding in the dark extra challenging but adding to the ambience.  Sunrise from the Platforms glowed pink across the eastern horizon, and gave us a good view of the summits overhead–no storm yet, just some spindrift blowing down from up high.

Smooth skinning turned to rock-hopping once we gained the upper south fork of the canyon, working our way through scree-fields and linking together snow patches.  Eventually we strapped our skis to our packs for good, finding bootpacking more efficient, and climbed a combination of last winter’s bulletproof snow and old avalanche debris to the base of the Southwest Couloir on the Middle Teton.

Being a generally windward-facing feature, the Southwest is often wind-hammered and scoured away, and this day was no exception.  It looked as though there was almost more rock than snow in there, so we alternated between kicking steps into firm windbuff and dry-tool scrambling through rockbands.  As it turned out, there was more snow available than we initially thought, although there would be no way to link up an uninterrupted ski descent.

Lenticular clouds were forming over the South Teton as we reached the summit, and the Grand stood eerily to the north, coming in and out of view as clouds streamed past.  What an amazing hunk of rock that is, with a wonderfully snowy cleft right down the south face.  It could use some more snow depth before becoming really skiable this season, but is a beauty nonetheless.

We took a bunch of photos from the summit and then scrambled back down to the ledge where we had left our skis.  The first few turns were actually pretty fun–chalky and firm, with plenty of exposure below to keep it exciting.  Then it deteriorated into side-stepping through thinly-covered rocks and full-on downclimbing to get to more skiable snow.  Skis on, skis off, skis on, skis off.

The trip down into Garnet was surprisingly quick, given how long it took us to get up there, and once we hit the top of the Cave “Couloir” the snow magically turned into creamy, fast powder. It felt awesome to open up some GS turns after chop-turning through the rocks above.

Garnet Canyon flew past in a blur of powder crystals as the two of us popped off of wind-drifts–so fun. Somewhere around the Platforms we stopped to take a look back up-canyon and received the day’s first face-full of snowfall.  The storm had arrived, after graciously giving us just enough time to do what we came to do.

We turned our skis down-canyon again for another hundred or so powder turns, and all of a sudden we were back at the lake, double-poling our way across to the moraines and our exit to the parking lot.  Eight hours after setting out we sat back in the parking lot with beer in hand, watching the high peaks become enveloped in the storm.  So thankful to live in this magical place.