From the highway the summit of Aetna was 8.4 miles and 4600ft round trip
The Grand Couloir screams Ski Me!!! View from the top of Monarch Pass
After skinning up FR 230 for an hour or so the couloir appeared. We skinned on hard snow about 2/3 of the way up.
When it got a little steeper we transitioned to booting. We were stoked to find a booter up the right side of the coolie.
It wasn't too steep and the booting was relatively mellow.
Robby booting the upper portion of the Grand
Robby tops out
Enjoying the views... you could see the Elks, Sangres, and San Juans.
Looking to the Shavano group and Bi-Centennial Taylor (about 1 mile way)
Centennial peak Mount Ouray to the south
Our initial plan was to do an out and back to Taylor, however Robby had developed blisters so we decided to hold off. Cancelling Taylor shortened our day by two hours. This caused a problem as it would take another couple of hours for the snow to corn up.
After 30 minutes of summit time, we decided that the wind was too annoying to wait another 90 minutes for corn, so we ended up skiing hard snow most of the way down. Not optimal :-/
As we got lower we found the snow on skier's right was quite a bit softer.
When you see him... ask Robby what happened just after this shot was taken ;-)
It would be fun to go back and ski this with better conditions as it is a classic 'blue' line.
Heading back to the Monarch Lodge... who graciously allowed us to park in their lot. I called ahead to get an ok.