Route: South Face to North Face and Navajo Basin

Team: Ted, Christy

It was a big two-fer to pull off. After El Diente, we began to climb Mount Wilson. The route up the North Face is straightforward until you get right below the summit. That’s when the angle steepens, the snow disappears, and the skiing suddenly seems unreasonable.

For years, much like El Diente, it was considered good to ski from the highest continuous snow from a point just below the summit. More recently, skiers have connected snow patches or billy-goated through the rocks to get a true summit descent. And nowadays, that’s the expected standard. So, as we poked around below the summit, we decided to climb to the top with our skis and then choose from there what looked best for skiing, if anything.

After some tricky, exposed climbing on the San Juan loose rock, we made it up the north side of the summit block. In hindsight, it may have been easier to just follow the more standard summer route a bit to the west.

From the top, a strip of snow led down to the south. It was littered with rocks but was continuous enough to allow us to click into our skis at the summit. We could go off the top through the thin stretch to more continuous snow below and then traverse to the east. After the traverse, to the col between Slate Creek and the basin to the south, we started down Slate Creek– the tricky part was done, we had pulled off a continuous ski descent of one of the more challenging summits.

Since we started at Silver Pick, we had to traverse once again and then climb up a short way to another col, which allowed us back into Navajo Basin. We skied back towards Rock of Ages Saddle and then down Silver Pick Basin as it got dark. We finished by headlamp.