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Lang Peak Descent North Face
Submitted by james_martin on Thu, 2010-03-25 19:09
Like every other winter in Golden BC, the weather this winter has been really hard to predict, and this winter's multiple buried hoer frosts have been pushing me to find long steep lines at higher elevation, the latest being a 2500ft line off Lang peak, which I think is the highest summit in the Dogtooth Range. This line has been on my list of things to ski ever since my friend Tim and I convinced our helicopter pilot to fly past this line on a flight home two years ago, but its location and my lack of a snowmobile have kept me from making any attempts. But realizing I hadn't skied in almost five days and seeing that super steep, high elevation terrain that does a lot of natural sluffing was actually the safest place to play, I called up my friend Jair and we decided to make an attempt on this line first thing the next day. We met up at 9:00 am and brought harnesses and a 30 meter rope to hep us get into the line. It took us about an hour to tandem in the approach on Jair's sled and then do the short boot-pack from the sled to the entrance of our line. We were immediately glad to have the rope and harnesses because we couldn't see into the line anywhere without walking on big scary cornices but after about half an hour looking at our options, and even having part of a cornice break off while I was standing on it, we found a sweet skinny entrance with no cornice at all. Once we dropped in, the snow was all sluffed out, wind-hammered, old avalanche bed surface the whole way through the line. We skied it leap frog style just in case a pocket of snow ripped out but all of the clues were pointing towards a very uniform, bullet proof snow pack. On the last pitch, I skied to the bottom to get a pic of Jair exiting line and then we started the trip back to the sled. It turns out that if I wasn't too cheap to own a sled we could have dropped a sled at the bottom and skied the whole line and hardly walked at all. Still though, it took us less than two hours of hiking to get to the sled and then we were home free, another fun day in the mountains.
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