TR: Birkenstock Couloir - March 29, 2013

[Hummus]

Great trip, this couloir is a SW coastal classic for sure.Top ten.
Holy drop in shot Liam. Glad you stuck it!I hope you realize TGR didn't have a heli waiting for us at the bottom. Just by chance you didn't stick the landing.

I'm bringing a rope next time!

Yeah I was pretty gripped dropping in and yeah a rope would have been good...

[lynchdogger]

^^^ This for sure. Yikes, nice stick. Even the eastern european judge back in the 70's would have given that a 9.5. Bring a rope and live longer.

All of it was most excellent. Seriously steep and entertaining TR. Very nice. Look forward to the next adventure.

You all rip.

[Neuro]

Bumping this to the top with some video by Andy Traslin of the descent. It's now at the top of the first post or here:

[lynchdogger]

^^^ Ya man!

[jesski]

Nice job, Andy & co. Glad to see conditions/ weather worked out for you guys this time.

Really fun, aesthetic line-- thanks for sharing.

[Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer]

Oh wow - that is a serious entrance!

[mtraslin]

Thanks for sharing the video! Great trip guys.

[Hicks]

Nice line with a sketchy entrance. Solid work.

[vanchuck]

Been eyeing up this one myself for a while -- my buddy and I had a chance this last weekend, though due to schedules we had to do it in a 1-day mission from Vancouver: 4:30am departure, hiking by 7:30am, summit at 1pm (with 2+ hours of bootpacking up the couloir), back down by 3:30, home by 7pm.

Found this TR the day before we did it and it gave us some good beta, thanks for posting it!

For the approach we took a route up that went to the very end of the road and through a cutblock (there's a flagged route along the ridge as we discovered on the way down) to avoid traversing through the icy trees, although it added another couple hundred meters of skin ascent to the day (Google Earth says it was 2100m ascent + 21km total).

There'd been a bunch of snow since you guys had been through, and we were keeping close tabs on snow and avy conditions on the way up, but luckily the bulk of that new snow had slid naturally already, and we felt pretty good about things as we kept on going up. Being almost perfectly North-facing, it had been spared from the super-variable sun crusts found on almost everything else nearby.

Couloir descent was super fun, but the mandatory cornice hop definitely kicks the whole experience up a notch-- not for the weak-kneed (literally?). Transitioning to skiing while on the top face isn't really an option either (or at least, I think it'd be scarier than just doing the cornice hop), so it's a bit of an all-or-nothing affair. Rope wouldn't be a bad idea either, but it's still doable if you have the nerves. There was a nice layer of newer mostly-consolidated snow to help keep the descent from getting too edge-punishing on the way down, and the lower couloir was actually really nice snow, although I probably would have enjoyed it even more if my legs weren't suffering from the 2.5hr stairmaster session and 150m vert of hop turns that preceded it...

Here's a shot from my buddy showing the steep upper face from a different angle (never did get an actual slope reading, pretty clearly at or above 50 degrees though):



Here's the lower couloir with surprisingly good snow for mid-April (the total vert of the couloir is about 500m, for scale):



Not sure what people are on about with all this end-of-winter talk...

[Orthoski]

Reading this is so much better than getting work done - thanks for this unbelievable share.

[Neuro]

Nicely done VanChuck.

[leftfield]

Looks gnar. Great TR

[AngryBeard]

Here's a shot from my buddy showing the steep upper face from a different angle (never did get an actual slope reading, pretty clearly at or above 50 degrees though):

Really cool angle, great shot!