Background
The North Cascades have a nearly endless number of aesthetic couloirs; some of them just end in nothingness and abyss-like valleys.
The numerous couloirs down to Moraine Lake fit the bill for everything a great couloir should be: deep, dark, and dank. There is one more prominent than the others, starting from the flanks below Torment and dropping approximately 2000′ down to the lake. It was first written about by in 2004 when Martin Volken and Andy Dappen skied the NW Face of Torment and mentioned the line. There are few trip reports of the couloir, other than one on Cascade Climbers from 2022; the group tried to link the NW Face into the couloir but could not pass through.
Okay…history class over. The couloir has been tossed around in my ski partner group for a while. My friends Nick and Kyle tried to ski it last year as part of a circumnavigation of Mt Torment but unfortunately didn’t have the right conditions align. Earlier this year Stephen, Nick and I made an attempt but turned around due to wind slab concerns.
Finally, I saw a window where cold, right-side up snow was aligning with a small pocket of visibility and cold temperatures. Letty has been psyched on the line for a while as well and it seemed to be a great opportunity to go and give it another try.
Trip Report
Letty and I headed out the night before, partially to see if we could drive to the trailhead and also to give ourselves an early start. It snowed down to 2500′ early in the week and we weren’t sure what the road condition would be like. We knew that there had been over a foot of new snow days prior but there’d been over 24 hours of settlement with low winds and people in nearby zones had been reporting good conditions. The forecast was calling for cold temperatures and pockets of clouds; it seemed to be a good forecast for traveling into the alpine, with our biggest concerns being visibility and wind slab potential. We had discussed the options for getting back out of Moraine Lake and preferred to take the north facing chute over the south climb to the Inspiration, if we could. We still brought glacier gear with us in case. We packed two tools and crampons but anticipated we wouldn’t use them due to all the dry, cold snow.
We found 4-5″ of snow on the road at the Eldo parking lot; we re-thought out using trail runners and opted to use ski boots from the car. We agreed on a 6AM start from the car, estimating the day would take us around 9 hours. Overnight there was 2-3″ of very low density snow that fell down to the trailhead but otherwise weather was calm.
We started just after 6AM and made quick work of crossing the river. Before the spring melt the water is pretty low and it’s easy to just hop over rocks. The climbers trail, however, was not quick. With 3-4″ of snow below 3k’ and 6-8″ of snow above that, it was very difficult to follow the trail and actually was more like booting than hiking. It took us over 2 hours to reach the boulderfield and transition to skins and we were pretty soaked by the time we got there. It was a pretty hard beat-down to start the day, to put it lightly.
A quick mental reset and we were skinning up the boulderfield in really, really good powder. Cold, dry, and rightside up. We couldn’t feel any inter-storm interfaces where we probed and numerous hand shears showed no results. Trail breaking was arduous, though, and our slow progress up to this point had us realizing it was going to be a longer day than estimated. Thankfully, daylight savings time!
We had pockets of visibility as we climbed up Eldorado Creek and began to traverse over towards the cross-over at 6400′ towards the west shoulder of Torment. Trail breaking was more like trenching: it was very slow going and hard. As we got higher the viz got worse but we could see that the cloud deck was seeming to hang right at ridgeline. We saw some ‘sucker holes’ on the north side of the ridgeline and held faith that it would improve. That said, there were some demoralizing moments traversing around 6300′ where it felt more like fishing for which way was up or down.
The cross-over at 6400′ went smoothly, even in a white out. The terrain was well filled in and we had no issues skinning to the saddle to the west of Torment. Just as we topped out the clouds began to part and we could start to see over onto the north side. What luck! We quickly transitioned, wanting to make use of this viz opportunity. We had not seen any signs of wind affect on our traverse over to the saddle and hand shears were continuing to show loose, unconsolidated dry snow of 8-10″ depth sitting on the old snow interface with little reactivity. It felt like all signs pointed to GO. It was ~12PM and had taken us around 5.5 hours to get there. With less deep trail breaking, this would go much faster.
We pushed off onto the broad, north slopes to the west of Torment and skied down and skier’s right towards the entrance to the couloir. We found great, settled, alpine pow that skied very well and didn’t move. WOOOOT! Stoke was high. As we suspected, the cloud deck was being hung up on the ridgeline with Torment and Forbidden and visibility was actually quite good on this side of the ridge.
We sighted the entrance to the couloir and I pulled up in a good spot to take some pictures of Letty. This couloir was really special to her and I wanted her to get first-go. The position of it was incredible; alpine cirque, blue ice in the walls, and huge mountains all around. Position and condition on this one, a rare combo.
Letty took the entrance and radioed back that it was skiing very well. Some slough management was required but nothing too bad. The entrance to the couloir does have a short roll-over to maybe 40 degrees or so but it’s not bad and very brief. You can see the entire couloir from the top, easily.
I followed, snapped a few tip shots, and found awesome conditions down to where she had stopped. Deep rock walls, a fun ‘party pitch’ angle, and great snow. WOW…worth waiting for this one.
I took video of Letty skiing down and was stoked out of my mind to watch her crush it.
We skied down to the lake and rejoiced at the couloir. We had doubts earlier in the day, with the arduous travel, heinous climbers trail in the morning, and ping-pong viz at times. It all worked out…just had to hold the faith. We skinned across the lake, peering up at the numerous other couloirs that drop down to the lake. It’d be really cool to set up a camp on the lake and ski them all! Or do an extended Forbidden Tour and add a few. We looked back at the Forbidden Glacier, admiring that descent. The exit onto the lake looked to go easily at this time of year, this season.
From up on the shoulder before we had skied down we’d peered at the south climb out of Moraine Lake. It looked doable and faces didn’t seem to be shedding much, yet. But as we started to skin across the lake and the sun was poking out at 1PM, faces were starting to shed. We didn’t love the option and continued to skin up towards the inlet of the lake to sight the north facing chute that is also used to climb out of Moraine. Unless it looked heinous, we discussed, we’d use that. We had assessed north facing terrain and didn’t have concerns about climbing up it.
The inlet to Moraine Lake was open and I was able to fill up on water, which was a welcome treat! I’d imagine most times of the year this would be the case, for what it’s worth.
We sighted the broad gully that climbs north up to below the Eggplant and liked the looks of it. It is plenty wide to put a few kick turns into and never is too steep to skin. It was a graupel pool at times and slow-going, but never took skins off.
Once above the gully, we used broad post-glacial moraine to gain the plateau between Eldo and the Eggplant. Yet again, visibility shut down and were mostly in ping-pong conditions. Travel was slow and arduous, again, as trail breaking was deep. We crested the plateau around 4PM and quickly transitioned, readying ourselves for a blind ski down the Eldorado Glacier.
The snow was still quite excellent on south aspects at the end of the day and did not show any signs of greenhousing. Skiing down the Eldorado in ping-pong yielded few fun turns and mostly just which way is down? I got some surprising reactivity on one convex roll-over around 6500′ where I stepped, slowly, onto the roll and got a huge shooting crack. I stopped, backed off, and found lower angle terrain. It definitely took both of us by surprise, as we had gotten no reactivity all day long on similar terrain. We suspected the solar input throughout the day may have de-stabilized things.
We quickly punched over Roush Creek divide to get back into Eldorado Creek and again got a surprising shooting crack to go on a convex, southerly roll-over. This time the shooting crack resulted in a D1 slide that went from my feet. We investigated the bed surface and found a rain crust down around 30cms that must have energized throughout the day. Now with our tails between our legs, we cautiously avoided all convex terrain skiing down Eldorado Creek back to the boulderfield.
Back at the boulderfield 11 hours in, we were pretty wiped. Long day, lotta work…but very content. We’d gotten the visibility we needed, when we needed it…and pretty much got no viz at any other points HA. While it would have been sweet to have full-on blue bird and soak up the views, the clouds keeping the sun at bay were welcomed.
Down-booting the Eldo climbers trail was not nearly as bad as we feared. We plunge stepped most of the way down, pretty soaked to the bone by this point but happy to be going down instead of up. We made it back to the car, 12.5 hours after starting, tired, happy and ready for some food!