| Surprised at Surprise | ||||||||||||||
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February 5, 2006 Phil, Greg, and I headed up to the Surprise area again. Justin and his friend Brian came along on their boards. We skinned up the valley, thinking about heading to Surprise Lake. This tour is, as Phil wrote, 'very approachy'. We broke trail for a long time. We eventually decided to go climber's right, and had a great time. We found good terrain and good snow. We took two runs down to the valley. On the second run we poked around and finally found a tight couloir that had intrigued me while skinning up. The others were kind enough to give me fresh tracks, and it turned out to be a very cool run. Since we were running out of time, and had done some 5500 vertical feet of climbing, we headed back to the car. The snowboarders skinned, the skiers skied, and we all made it back to the cars. Surprise Area has good terrain, but you start very low - around 2000 feet. To ski to the car you want a very good low elevation snowpack.
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