I wrote a previous blog about backcountry skiing up Cascadilla Creek. We recently returned to this basin and were greeted with at least 4’ of additional snow. We’ve had very mild temps the last few days so the snowpack was set up and made for a much easier climb up in the basin.

This basin is gorgeous and with bluebird conditions this was probably the nicest day of skiing I’ve ever had.

Cody managed a quick trip back from Minnesota to make this outing with me. What a beautiful day we had.

Because of the great snow conditions we were able to climb up to the ridge separating crystal creek and cascadilla creek. The views from up here were superb. It took about 3 hrs for this old guy to make the trip up here, but so glad I was able to do it.

The Crystal creek basin looked like it would be fantastic for skiing down. I’ve never skied up this drainage so we didn’t attempt descending here. I’ll have to plan a trip up this drainage to see what kind of access there is.

I stopped my assent up on the ridgeline. Cody elected to skin up the ridge so that he could ski across and descend the face of the mountain.

It was a beautiful day with moderate avalanche danger. We tried to be extremely cautious about our time on the steep slopes we had to cross. Although the sun was causing numerous small slides on the surface areas, we didn’t feel we were in any significant danger as most of the bad slide areas had come down during the rain event a few weeks ago.

What a fantastic area and beautiful day. Hopefully I will get a few more outings before spring, but this one will be hard to beat.