Sol Mountain Lodge, March 1-7
This may be a bit dated now but work has been nuts and honestly I've been feeling a bit unmotivated by the weird weather, snow and avy conditions… :-)
Anyway, we flew from Revy into Sol a few weeks ago on a week long guided/catered trip.
If you haven't been to see Aaron Cooperman's operation up there, it's well worth the price of admission. The lodge is first rate and luxurious, and even with a large group like ours (18 folks) there's was plenty of room. The terrain is fantastic with tons of steep treed lines, glades, chutes, drops and alpine bowls. In a "normal year" there is tons of production powder skiing to be had! This year the terrain was pretty limited, unfortunately, for reasons I'm sure this community here is all too aware of.
Pretty much from the get-go we were concerned about the 02/08 and 01/24 SH sandwich down about 50 to 100cm – otherwise referred to as the "Hoar on Hoar Dominatrix matrix". We had even more cause to respect this nasty duo when we ventured into some northern aspects around "Peter's Glades" with spectacular results. Here's a size 2 my wife kicked off skiing through 15 degree terrain:
The slide propagated from her skis, up the ridge feature to a tree and where Aaron was standing, and then ripped about 100m further to lookers left. She kept her cool and figure 11'd out of there before the debris got near her. A week earlier and I'm sure the whole slope we were on would've slid.
The slide also set off about a half kilometer of sympathetic slides into more obvious avalanche terrain, referred to later in the 03/03 ACM report "Propagation Across the Sol Nation".
Armed with a new definition of avalanche terrain as being anything over 14.5 degrees, we pretty much spent the rest of the trip doing long tours on mellow terrain like Baldur South
and Area 51 to name but a few.
It wasn't all hiking, though, we did manage to get a few turns in on south facing butter slopes. The weather was truly April-like which was pretty enjoyable I must say.
As for apres ski, we had the house band "Kitty & the Two Man Louge" (yours truly on left, yes that really is a guitar) and plenty of great food and beverages.
Anyway, that's about it for now – my wife is standing behind me to let me know I need to wrap this up and head out for some dinner party. I'll try to upload a few other picts later. - cheers!
