And up we went . . . you can see the road just over my shoulder.

We ended up hiking into a big cirque and I couldn’t help but be drawn to the impressively alpine line at its head. It’s rare to find lines this aesthetic and be standing at the base of them. Scott agreed to go investigate, but decided not to pursue the line part way up, but was super supportive of my going. He waited in the safe area of the bowl below as I continued to climb. Although it got fairly steep (moreso than I thought it would at the bottom), the snow quality stayed impressively consistent. We had dug a pit lower that showed a fabulously homogenous snowpack, and it didn’t change much (except for some wintry surface snow) as I went up. I had a turn around time of 5pm and reached my goal just about then, rewarded with an amazing descent down to Scott – the line was probably about 2000 ft, but likely about 4500 ft from the road. Not bad since the tunnel was over 10,000 ft elevation!!!

Me skiing down the apron

Me, with the line just to the looker’s right of my head, off the ridgeline. At this point, I was psyched and full of adrenaline . . . welcome to La Frontera (the border)!!