Mount Arkansas North Facing Couloirs, Leadville, Colorado
The weather forecast was for it to be very windy and also very sunny in the morning. Mike and I were planning to head out to the sub peak between Mount Tweto and Mount Arkansas outside of Leadville, CO and ski one of the couloirs off of that peak. When we parked at the trailhead that morning, we found no wind. It was the complete opposite of the 45 mph wind gusts that the forecast was calling for. We thought that maybe the wind would pick up as we went farther into the basin as it can be a windy area so we decided to head in our planned direction, even though we knew we might be too late for our planned line with how warm conditions were.
As we headed in to the basin, there still was no wind so we started discussing other options that wouldn’t have seen as much sun yet at that time of the day. As we got eyes on Arkansas, we noticed a few north facing couloirs that came off the lower east ridge that looked like potential options so we headed towards those. As we got closer, we felt good about the snow, which felt like it hadn’t been sun affected yet. So we skinned up to the bottom of the first couloir and then transitioned to putting our skis on our backpacks and crampons on our boots and headed up the couloir. After several hundred feet, we topped out and transitioned to ski mode. We then headed down the couloir and regrouped at the bottom. Since it wasn’t a very long line, we decided to check out another line lookers left of the one we had just skied so we headed up that one and skied it as well. After this line, our ski cups felt pretty full so we decided to call it a day and head back to the car. I feel like I have some unfinished business in this basin and plan to be back to check out some of the lines we had originally been looking at another day.
Total stats: 5.6 miles, 2400 ft of elevation gain
