Route: Southeast Couloir
Team: Ted, Christy, Kim Havell, Karen Kingsley
Taking advantage of the huge upslope storm that blanketed the Sangres with snow a few weeks earlier, we went to the Crestone Needle. We skinned up the South Colony Lakes Road and set up camp for the night.
The next morning, as we made our way up Broken Hand Pass, we came up on two other women skiers, Karen Kingsley and Kim Havell from the Telluride/Ophir area. None of us had met before, but we all kind of knew of each other, and we climbed the Needle together, getting to know each other along the way. Christy was psyched to see other women out there taking on this sort of stuff. We’ve been friends with the girls ever since.
The skiing in the Southeast Couloir was good, much better than when I was here back in ’07. Actually, despite being a challenging peak, with the efforts of the four of us kicking steps and the easy skiing corn snow, we made it up and down pretty quickly and decided to set our sights on Humboldt. Why not?
We dropped north off of Broken Hand Pass and then began making our way over to the Upper South Colony Lake, and the normal route for Humboldt. A short bit later we were actually on Humboldt’s summit and skiing the long, mellow slope back down to the 4wd road and our camp. Not a bad twofer.
We packed up camp and high tailed it back to the truck. Christy and I skied Massive the following day.
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