Tuckerman Ravine: 3-31-06

[awf170]

So finally I convinced my dad to go up Tuckermans and what a great day it was for it.

We started out at about 8:20 from pinkham notch and it was already extremely warm. I decided to skin all the way from the base and only had to take my skis off twice(though I did skin over a lot of rocks and dirt).

About halfway up a figured out skinning was absoluty useless and I would have went the same speed hiking and wouldn't have had so many blisters. If I had touring boots it probably would have been faster and easier then hiking but without them it is just a pain. I was starting to think I would have been better off with NHPH over at Wildcat right now, until I got the first few views:

Finally after about 2 hours of pure torture and sweating we were at the bowl.

 

[awf170]

countinued...

After the hike my dad was pretty much totally dead and feeling kind of sick from the heat, so I decided to try the lip for my first run. Wow that bootpack was scary, defiantly a lot scarier than skiing down. I really should have warmed up on something easier because after about 3 horrible turns I was the steepest part of the lip. I survived it, but probably looked like the biggest gaper ever to everyone at lunch rocks(luckily there weren't too many). Here are some pics from the top of the lip:

I decided to ski all the way to the bottom of the bowl to actually get some warm up turns in:

My dad ended up going up the lip after about 20 minutes so he was about halfway by the time I was coming down. After about an hour break I decided to go for another run, it looked like it was going to get shady soon on the lookers left side of the bowl so I decided to do right gully. Here are a few pics from the top of right gully.

 

[awf170]

The top of right gully was really steep and had no warm up turns what so ever so I decided to go into the upper snowfields to get some warm up turns. Man were those turns awsome, had a bunch of nice low angled totally untracked corn turns. I would have went further up the summit cone, but being by myself and my dad already wondering were I was I decided to go down. Pics from upper snow fields area:

Holy crap. Right gully absolutely rocked, nice deep corn, probably one of my best runs ever! Now the hell begins: After asking a bunch of people about the condition of the lower headwall and getting no real answers I decided to start hiking down, but after a little hike a saw a few snowboarders who looked like they knew were they going so a followed them. Wrong idea. After cutting across the cutler river I knew I was trapped on the wrong side because there was no way I walking across a think layer of snow over a open river and screwed. Luckily I yelled back to my dad and told him not to follow me. Heres were the fun began. This group of snowboarders I followed obviosly had mental problems because they were going down little headwall then just sitting there next to open water! I decided that there was no way that was safe, so I started bushwacking around it. I finally got back on the river at a lower spot and went as fast as I possibly could just to get off that death trap. Finally I got back to hojo's and waited for my dad. Now back to good skiing. The sherbie absolutey rocked for the first half, nice soft moguls, awsome corn, and some extremely nice glades of to the edges. The next 1/4 was okay but a little bare and required some grass skiing. And the bottom 1/4 was closed.
Anyway despite the mess of little headwall and hiking through mud and ice in ski boots at the bottom of the tucks trail it was an awsome day, defiantly want to get up there again this season.

 

[NHpowderhound]

Glad to hear you had a succesful trip!
Did you have your ski boots loose for the skin up? I have found there is a fine line of comfort vs. blisters if they are too loose.
I was drooling all day looking over at MW! =P~
((*
*))NHPH

 

[awf170]

Glad to hear you had a succesful trip!
Did you have your ski boots loose for the skin up? I have found there is a fine line of comfort vs. blisters if they are too loose.
I was drooling all day looking over at MW! =P~
((*
*))NHPH

Yeah they were too loose. Once I figured this out I already had horrible blisters.


Hey Admin do you think this should be split up into to 3 different threads because I see that is loading extremely slow even with a fast internet connection?

 

[riverc0il]

nice TR! looks like you had a peeeeeerfect day for your first time up, nice one. stinks hearing the skinning on the TRT is so bad and the sherbie's bottom quarter bowing out before april! when was the last time that happened i wonder?

avi report indicates people were punching through the boot ladder heading up the lip yesterday :shock: eek. and it sounds like someone took a dunk in the cutler trying to do lower headwall, glad you got through okay. that is a good lesson to learn though, don't follow other people just because they know what they are doing! stinks having to hoof it this early in the season though.

the entire site seems slow to me, your pics should be fine. the forum mandates they be a certain size which reduces problems of posting too many.

i was debating going tomorrow, but with the rain and a potential for a freeze and not the best weather tomorrow, i may just head to cannon for their last day. :? i'd really like to earn some turns, but given your description of the skin up TRT and potential for marginal conditions at best in the bowl, eh, i am not quite feeling it despite how fast it is going.

 

[riverc0il]

eh, i just noticed you embedded the pics instead of hosting locally. you could always resize your images down to 475ish. that is a really good compromise point at which size and quality balance off nicely. entire site is still slow regardless though.

 

[awf170]

eh, i just noticed you embedded the pics instead of hosting locally. you could always resize your images down to 475ish. that is a really good compromise point at which size and quality balance off nicely. entire site is still slow regardless though.

The entire site is probably slow because of my pictures :lol: I put them on alpinezone thinking that they would automatically be resize, but I guess they weren't.

 

[awf170]

nice TR! looks like you had a peeeeeerfect day for your first time up, nice one. stinks hearing the skinning on the TRT is so bad and the sherbie's bottom quarter bowing out before april! when was the last time that happened i wonder?

avi report indicates people were punching through the boot ladder heading up the lip yesterday :shock: eek. and it sounds like someone took a dunk in the cutler trying to do lower headwall, glad you got through okay. that is a good lesson to learn though, don't follow other people just because they know what they are doing! stinks having to hoof it this early in the season though.

the entire site seems slow to me, your pics should be fine. the forum mandates they be a certain size which reduces problems of posting too many.

i was debating going tomorrow, but with the rain and a potential for a freeze and not the best weather tomorrow, i may just head to cannon for their last day. :? i'd really like to earn some turns, but given your description of the skin up TRT and potential for marginal conditions at best in the bowl, eh, i am not quite feeling it despite how fast it is going.

Yep, doesn't suprise me at all that someone went through the little headwall. That was defiantly the scariest thing I have ever done. The worst thing is once I crossed the river the first time I knew I was trapped and had to find a way down. Very stupid one my part. There was a ton of people doing it too. At hojo's a saw a few more people coming down it and just thought to my self that someone is going to go for a dip.


Also what would be the easiest way for me make the pics lower quality and a smaller size? I really do not want to download them all again.

 

[riverc0il]

Also what would be the easiest way for me make the pics lower quality and a smaller size? I really do not want to download them all again.

your digi cam should have image editing software. though my personal favorite program for such quick and easy adjustments is irfanview. its freeware to boot. web sites will never "resize" the actual image but sometimes forum software is programmed to limit the dimensions. it is still the same uber large file, it just gets shrunk to fit the screen. best bet is to resize when you download the pics from your digi cam. nothing is more annoying than waiting for 20 1Mb pics to load

looks like your pics may be slowing things down a little, my new post on MRG today is popping right up.

 

[Admin]

The advice already mentioned re: photo sizing is spot on.

 

[Lftgly]

Great report, AWF, and nice pictures!

I see what you mean about the slow load, but once it loads, the pictures are great! I've avoided cross-posting in other forums, but AZ has the nice auto-resize picture upload, and embedding larger picts from another website in the FTO text makes the best presentation.

Marc, after a long day on he trails, resizing all my picts to 360x480 is a killing me! And they don't do the TR justice. I'll probably follow AWF's lead after my Oakes post faux pas.

AWF, it sounds like it took a lot of convincing, but you've got the best Dad in the world to go up there and ski it with you!