Lisa Falls Couloir, Utah -- Andrew's Tips on Skiing BC Couloirs (Hardwear Sessions)

Andrew McLean sent us this video of Dylan Freed skiing the Lisa Falls Couloir in LCC, UT. Enjoy!

By Andrew McLean

Skiing huge couloirs is one of my all-time favorite activities. There is just something about standing at the top of a 3,500' line and seeing it stretch beneath your tips all the way to the valley floor in one continuous blaze of glory. If I had my way, I'd ski couloirs every day, but part of the allure of them is that you have to get them in the right conditions for safety and quality concerns.

In general, it is best to hike up a couloir before you ski it. This is a double-edged sword as it gives you a chance to assess the snow stability and look for ice, but it also means that you are going to be spending a few hours climbing directly up an avalanche path. Because of this, timing is critical when it comes to skiing the Big Guns.

From an avalanche safety standpoint, the best time to ski a big couloir is when it is frozen solid, as often happens in the spring. The downside of this is that frozen couloirs can be sketchy to ski and often have death-cookies (frozen chunks of snow) welded into them that don't make for fun turns. It's a fine line to finding couloirs that are safe enough to ski, yet also enjoyable at the same time.

One trick to increase your success ratio is to keep a hit-list of couloirs you want to ski. Different aspects (north, south, east & west) all have different conditions at different times. The beauty of a hit-list is that you can first decide which aspect will be safest (and perhaps have the best skiing) and then pick a likely candidate from your list. After a five year couloir skiing spree, I had compiled a big enough hit list that it eventually turned into a guidebook: The Chuting Gallery - A Guide to Steep Skiing in the Wasatch Mountains.

One of the harder (and thus most satisfying) conditions to nail is a south facing couloir in deep powder. South facing lines are tough as the sun quickly turns the snow to mush, yet if you get after them too soon, the new snow may not have had enough time to safely settle out. Because of this, it takes very special conditions such as perfectly light, bonded snow or a storm followed by days of cold temperatures and cloud cover, but no wind or additional snow. These conditions are hard to come by and seldom coincide with a daily work schedule which means skiing big south facing lines in deep powder is a true rarity.

Another factor which greatly increases your odds is to have a motivated partner. I lucked out last Tuesday when my friend Dylan Freed suggested we give the great grandmother of all south facing chutes in the Wasatch, Lisa Falls Couloir, a look. Lisa Falls is one of the harder lines to reach and also one of the largest couloirs in the Wasatch, with 5,000' of vertical drop.It had been snowing for the previous few days, which made me a bit nervous.

Lisa Falls is a monster funnel and skiers are exposed to avalanches at almost all times while in it. To access the snowpack, we toured up the backside and skied a warm-up on a run named "Bonkers" before wrapping around to the main attraction. Along the way, we looked for any signs of collapsing, cracking or natural avalanches. Once we got to the ridgeline, we were able to look down into Lisa Falls and drop a few cornices on the south facing slopes to see if the snow below would react. So far, so good.

On this particular day, we also had the advantage of following some other skiers who had the same idea. They did us a huge favor by breaking trail all the way to the summit of Twin Peaks and then got the honors of first tracks on the way down. We were about an hour behind them and took our time to avoid skiing down on top of them and accidentally setting off an avalanche which might hit them.

Once we got into it, the skiing was great. The top was a bit windblown and crusty, but the middle 2,500' was dreamy, creamy, deep powder. Being a 5,000' line, the by the time we got to the bottom the snow had started to get mucky in the warm lower elevations, but it was still very skiable.

Just as we thought we had it made, we came across a 50' cliff. Fifty feet is not huge by today's cliff-jumping standards, but for remote backcountry skiing, hucking something like this is an unnecessary risk if you can avoid it. Luckily, we could as I had packed a 50' section of accessory cord for emergency rappels just like this. We found a scraggly little tree, tied all of its twiggy branches together, said a silent prayer, and hand rappelled down the ice and over the gaping waterfall hole at the bottom. The party of three skiers before us, having better snow and perhaps no rope, had straight-lined it!

This was my forth time down Lisa Falls and every descent has been an adventure. The first time was many years ago with the late, great Alex Lowe, which was so good it got me hooked on backcountry skiing. Although I've skied many couloirs since then, Lisa Falls in soft powder with good friends is an experience which is hard to top.