An afternoon on Wimpy's

Eric came down from Bozeman for a 4-day weekend. On Friday we headed into Teton Park for a ski tour up Wimpy's Knob. I've gone part of the way up to the top on several occasions, but had never been all the way up. On previous tours I had always turned around due to poor snow conditions. This time the weather and snow conditions were much more suitable.

The storm cycle of the past week or so had created avalanche hazards in some areas of the Teton range. We dug two snow pits (umm, okay, Eric dug two pits) to have a look at the snowpack. We found very stable snow.

The weather was sunny and warm, I was climbing in just my baselayer until we got to the bottom of the upper bowl where the winds picked up. As you can see in this view of Albright Peak, the snow was swirling in the wind.

It was windy on top of the Knob; I'd estimate 25 mph gusting to 40. Not very pleasant, so we didn't linger there at all. The snow in the upper bowl was good, not great, but good as long as you stayed on the north side of the ridge where there had been less sun exposure. 

Maybe because I haven't been out skiing enough lately, but I didn't really have the energy for a second lap in the upper bowl. I offered to hunker down and wait in the sun, out of the wind, while Eric did another lap; he decided that the conditions weren't good enough that he absolutely had to do another. So we skied on out. The ski conditions on the lower third of the mountain were definitely not enjoyable -- heavy sun-affected, please-don't-let-me-blow-a-knee kind of snow. Yuck. But we made it to the bottom, and came to the second-best part of Wimpy's - two miles to the car, all downhill!