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On Sunday we got a ski of a line that I've been hoping to do for a long time - the Refrigerator Couloir on Ice! We got about half a mile past Winfield before being stopped by snow and starting up a few minutes before 7. We were encouraged by the hard freeze the night before, and made our best time of the day in trail runners with skis on our back until we got into the basin proper four miles later.
Just after transitioning to skins and entering the basin
We continued through the basin on skins, bypassing the steep headwall to the right. We were able to keep skins on all the way into the high basin. You could theoretically skin right up to the bottom of the couloir, but once past the lower headwall we transitioned to booting.
There was an instance midday when we weren't sure we were going to be successful. The sun that was warming everything so nicely disappeared behind high clouds and stayed there for an hour or two, retaining the hard surface and making us wonder whether we were going to be able to ski our line safely. We opted to continue on to the base of the couloir, hoping things would improve. Fortunately, two awesome things happened at the bottom of the couloir - the sun returned and we found the snow quality in the north facing line to be significantly better: the new snow from our last storm not sun affected and reasonably consolidated.
We made pretty quick work up the couloir and were soon ready to transition.
Making a speedy transition under the cornice
For all the concern about rockfall, etc, probably the sketchiest thing we did all day was the forced transition under the overhanging cornice at the top of the route. It was pretty much the only place to transition to skis effectively, so we climbed down one by one and clicked in before skiing through the crux to the next safe point.
A few thoughts regarding the ski itself. The line does indeed go very briefly to 55deg and I think maintains a little over 45deg. While the crux happens pretty high on the line, it actually relents quite a bit immediately thereafter and did not feel quite as consequential as we were expecting it might. Technically, the ski felt pretty similar to the NE Couloir of Arkansas, albeit a good bit longer and more remote.
We were not expecting to be skiing something approaching powder in the couloir, but that's what we got! It was AWESOME!
After skiing out of the couloir, the snow transitioned to a perfect corn, and we got another 1500' of more mellow corn skiing.
We weren't sure if we could ski the noticeable cleft in the lower headwall, but gave it a shot. Turns out you can! In our early-May conditions, we could make turns in most of it, with one small shot that had to be straightlined:
After that, we exited primarily on the streambed before catching up with the trail near the Lake Ann junction. One of the downsides of doing it the time of year that we did is that we did endure several miles of postholing hell (transitioning between bare trail and still deep drifts) before getting to our car. An awesome, super memorable day! RT 12.6mi, 3700', 9h.
Caption Here
https://www.strava.com/activities/1554821855
Thumbnails for uploaded photos (click to open slideshow):
Thanks for the report, on Saturday the 12th we were able to get all the way to the 4wd trailhead. I assume a lot has melted out since your trip report. Someones bootpack was still in the Coulior (assuming yours), so that made for a nice cruise up refrigerator for us.
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