Hand Crack and Singletrack: The coalpit in my stomach

I am learning a few things this holiday season: one, the power of google earth. I recently discovered the coolest website known to man, http://wasatchbackcountryskiing.com/ which is essentially a dream come true for the avid wasatch backcountry fanatic whether on skis or just plain old feet for planning tasty days in the wilderness. I am obviously behind the times as I don't have a smart phone yet, and am now just learning how to use this awesome feature that 9/10 elementary school kids have no doubt mastered already. However, I managed to somehow draw our ski line on a map and stick in a elevation profile. Wahoo. I can do what normal people can do. Let me know if I can make you some toast.

That leads me into my second thing I've learned: The amount of fun you can have skiing is inversely proportional to the amount of wallowing you have to do to actually ski. That's right, wallow. Here is how I learned that.

Court has decided he wants to ski all the crazy classic lines in the wasatch. I'm fine with that. However, I now realize this involves some suffering. The next line on his list was Coalpit Headwall, a gorgeous north face near the western part of the LCC ridgeline. Apparently there is no good way of approaching this beast, though many. One way is to start at white pine trailhead and traverse through time and space and 4 major drainages, white pine, red pine, maybird, and hogum before eventually landing in coalpit. Another involves ascending a booter up the Y couloir, which may be nice if one is already in place. Finally there is the most direct route, ours, where you just freaking hump your way up coalpit. Here is why our way is not an academy award winner.

Court, Pete, Steve and I started off around 7 am navigating the mine field that is the pentapitch boulder field. I have never fell in so many holes. Next comes the gully. The lower portion of the drainage is steep and narrow, with big boulders, a river, and cliffs preventing easy skinning. We wallowed, and wallowed, and then groveled up deep, deep powder over slick granite for like 1.5 hours, then looked back and could swear we had barely gone 100 yards up that thing. The major obstacle came soon after, a waterfall of sorts with a fixed handline(thank you, praise the man who left this) up the right side. With skis on our backs, we all managed to thrash our way up the 5th class granite powder mantle pine tree manuever to safety. The drainage continued on in its usual frustrating fashion before finally opening up and we could actually skin without extensive shrubbery lassoing. We hit the top of the drainage and finally got a great look at the headwall.

Struggling through the pentapitch boulder field's adjacent thicket

Steve pretending he is having fun. His fleece is as frozen as Hans Solo

Finally some skinnable territory

Unfortunately, after 5 hours of swimming, Steve and I had to return home to our wives, but the two single hardmen pressed on to ski the actual headwall, though Pete seemed more excited about lunch than continuing on, but gave in due to the only remaining stoked member of our team's sarcastic guilt trip. Steve and I got some good turns in on the way down, dropping some fun hoppers, before Steve tragically skied through Court's defecation which was left earlier, which proceeded to freeze to his skis, requiring extensive pole scraping as the smell was horrific and the proximity to his face disturbing when latched on his backpack. After cleanup, we fell our way down the gully to the welcoming jungle shcwak thicket that finally led us back to our car. Very reminiscent of some "fun" Logan ski days.