We parked east of hairpin and geared up, taking in the scenery. Once we hit the snow, we decided to see how far we could get walking up through the trees until plunge stepping got too annoying.

It wasn’t long before we switched to skinning, only a slightly better option down low. Not long after that we got into the open and ski crampons were necessary to make it up the smooth frozen surface.

Approach through debris field Approaching the debris field.

When we reached the debris field with a clear view of the goal. We took a quick snack break and switched to using boot crampons so we could boot up the couloir.

This turned into an exercise of finding snow with the right amount of sun exposure, not too soft, not too frozen. After what felt like an eternity, we reached the soft scree finish at the top.

Topping out Big Kangaroo Topping out Big Kangaroo.

The ski down the East side wasn’t terrible, with better corn on next section, as we started to traverse South on the back side of Kangaroo.

At that point we start to notice cornices on just about every col we could use to cross back over, and discuss our options. In the end, we decide to traverse as far as we could before it became too committing, that way we could get a better view of all the options and choose what we thought was safest.

The big wall behind Big Kangaroo The big wall behind Big Kangaroo.

We picked one without any cornices, but as we get closer we started to notice a large cornice hanging from rocks on the North side of the col and discussed what we thought was a safe approach, making sure to avoid it’s path as we transitioned from skinning to booting.

While doing so, a hidden cornice on the South side of the col came crashing down maybe 50ft to our left. We speed up and quickly booted up the deep soft snow that had remained well protected from the sun and wind.

Soft couloir Booting up the soft couloir.

Once at the top, we took some time to gather ourselves as we take in the view. Considering this col wasn’t in our original plan, we checked the topo maps and noticed it didn’t look too bad directly down, so we cautiously worked our way down to the snow line.

Final descent Final descent.

After a short and sweet decent, we traversed skiers left to an open bowl area and came across fresh tracks from another team earlier in the day, and what looked a nice future objective.

The rest of the ski out wasn’t terrible, as we picked our way through the trees and rocks, from there we were able to make it all the way to the hairpin in a single push.