Day 47 - Thursday Mar. 22 - A Morning Out With The Code-Man

He probably doesn't like to be referred to as "The Code-Man," but since I am such a Step By Step fan I figured it would work. I always liked Code-Man from the show. He was always so wacky, but yet still with it. Anyway, I digress. Cody and I met at the park-n-ride at 5:30 this morning (without any problems waking up). Neither of us said anything about it, but we both thought about doing Patsy Marley. We decided on doing Silverfork instead. We haven't been back there for some time and with the little bit of snow we got yesterday it might be decent, right? eh. I ran into a few issues on the ascent because I am still on my Havoc skins with my Insane skis. With the way the snowpack is right now (hard) and the steep climbs we had to make occasionally, this proved to be quite difficult this morning. There was even a time where it was easier for me to bootpack than to skin. We did make it up, but only to find that the snow was minimal and somewhat stiff at best. We began skiing down and got some decent turns in, but the majority were turn-and-slide type turns (at least mine were that way). The lower angle stuff toward the bottom of the bowl was better than the top and we skied down a little further than we may have any other time because of this. We were planning on making another lap when we heard some definite avalanche activity happening somewhere in the backcountry. We could not tell where it was, or how it started; but we totally heard something big that sounded like a large avalanche. I will keep an eye on the internet today to see if anything is reported. In light of this new information we collectively decided that we would just call it a day. We skinned back to the top and skied down some ridge lines to get back down (for safety reasons). We were able to swing down and catch one or two turns in the Patsy Marley area and the snow was pretty darn good. We totally made the wrong decision on where to go today. Oh, well. It was a beautiful morning and a great way to start off the day. For all of you who are wondering, no, I was not ever in any immediate avalanche danger. We simply took the information we had and adjusted our plans accordingly. Thank you for caring.