Deer Mountain West Face Ski

Trailhead: North Fork Lake Creek TH (Highway 82 - Hairpin turn on east side of Indy Pass
Distance: 7.5 Miles
Elevation Gain: 3000ft
Time: 4 Hours 45 Minutes
(Stats exclude the bike ride as I was on an e-bike)
Partners: Carl Dowdy, Jeremy Miller, Krishna Gandhi
GPX

Deer 14ers.com Page

Highway 82 was still closed for the season, so we road bikes the 2.5 miles from the road closure to the TH.

The skin from the road to the base of Deer was straight forward and easy. Just don't get caught back there without supportable snow... would be a bitch getting out.

The route we took to Deer's summit was also pretty good minus some punchy postholy snow close to the ridge. At times I was using 6 points of contact (feet, knees and hands) to minimize postholing.

Deer has three notable ski lines. The north face, east face and west face. Our plan was to make a game time decision between west and north when we reached the summit. The east line is best skied if you approach from the east... Halfmoon.

The entrance for the north face was gaurded by cornices and thin snow high on the line so we opted to ski west.

The snow high on the west line was a challenging mix of firm and breakable crust. It was difficult to tell if we would break through the crust on any given turn. We ended up finding some perfect corn halfway down the line.

This zone is filled with amazing ski objectives... the one I am coming back for is the north face of PT13738.

A big thanks to Andrew Hollenbeck for lending me his e-bike... which I reached speeds in excess of 40mph!