May 7, 2019
Sledventure! Lee and I went up into the basin of Clear Lake!! The goal was to try to get to Ice Lakes and US Grant!! We started snowmobiling up South Mineral to the campground where the summer trail goes up to Ice Lakes. There was no way up through there so we turned back around and start climbing up the road to Clear Lake. We made it pretty far up that and into the drainage above the waterfall, but could not get past a certain point. So we tossed our skins on and started hiking up more!! At this point, we were not totally set on US Grant and just wanted to ski. We decided to hike up towards Clear Lake and see what was up in there! Beautiful in there!! The mountains were huge!! We hiked into the basin and started going up the Northeast face to try to get to the saddle and look over into US Grant! As we were skinning up the slope whomphed big time and we quickly turned around and got off that slope. That got the heart pumping! We think it must have been from the snow not totally freezing through during the night and on top of a layer maybe where snowmelt had been running through?! Not totally sure. Caught us off guard! After it happened we both felt like it was time to call it!! We skied back down to the basin, had lunch, and then skied back down to the snowmobile!! Still an awesome day in the mountains!! We got out there! Been thinking about that zone since we got back and even though we did not ski things we wanted to it was still crazy cool to get back there!! BIG MOUNTAINS!!!!!!
Ski Bum Philosophy 