Backcountry Skiing LCC to BCC via Days Fork

When your friends tell you it’s gonna be a big day, and those same friends are in way better shape than you, it should’ve been my first clue. Nonetheless, we set up from Flagstaff Gully with a bunch of skiing ahead of us. The plan was to ski from Little Cottonwood Canyon, down to Big Cottonwood Canyon, where we had parked a shuttle truck earlier that morning. That in itself isn’t a big deal, but knocking out a few laps on the way was going to be where all the very really is.

After climbing the sun rusted southern aspect of Flagstaff gully, we hit the ridge to drop into our first run. The entire climb up the sun affected southern slope was horrendous. We all felt like baby giraffes out there, with our skins barely sticking to the snow. Eventually, we made it up to the ridge without anyone sliding all the way back down to the trailhead. The line we chose was somewhere between Two Dogs and Oingo Boingo. The guys hit a cliff line while I chose to ski a chute to the right that ended up sluffing me off the line. Skiers are hard to find in these photos, but hey, that’s half the fun. The snow was incredible, felt bottomless for some of us, with creamy, knee deep turns still out there.

After regrouping at the bottom, we headed back up the ridge to Peak 10561 to ski Main Days. Looking back at the ridge we just skied made the hike up to 10561 even more worth it. The skin track; however, only got worse and worse as the day went on.

This run Brett hucked it off a cliff on the ridge into Main Days and I ended up with a pretty epic shot! It’s even funnier to know that Brett had just told Kyle this idea was stupid because the cliff takeoff was too rocky… it wasn’t. The snow was fantastic as long as you hugged the north side of the ridge. As soon as you bottomed out and hit any of the easterly aspects, the crust monster would jump up and grab you. It got real sketchy the further down the run we got.

We skinned back up the north side ridge of Main Day’s for our 3rd lap of the day. From here, we could see some pretty epic views of BCC and Chicken Shit Ridge which was our next objective. The group divided up and mike and I decided to ski these chutes lower down the ridge. They only had a single track in them and looked amazing, and turns out, they were amazing. Mike and I waited for the rest of the group to meet up with us at the bottom.

For the last run of the day, we climbed back up Chicken Shit Ridge to ski down into Days Draw. By this point, all the snow was fired if it had anything but steep and a true north aspect. Luckily we found some trees that kept the snow cold and we had a blast skiing all the way down the drainage to BCC and back to the truck. A huge day, in my opinion, and I was totally worked after that.