Ruby Mountains Part 3

Another morning and this one is the most beautiful of them all. It is Valentine's day and the Rubies have a lot of love in store for us. On this day we cover the most ground of any day. We start our day by working across boiler plate snow conditions that is impossible to get grip on. We have to be creative and pick just the right spots to step to insure that our skins grip. We quickly are looking down on Overland lake and we have 1,000 feet of beautiful bowl skiing all the way onto the lake. Above the lake is an amazing blue ice fall. All around us are long, steep lines which have probably never been skied before. You could spend an entire ski career in the Overland Lake drainage.

Yeah We got to ski this!

Epic lines. This is the kind of stuff movies are made of!

We were able to traverse across the bottoms of huge cirques and cover a lot of ground in just a short period of time. Then it was time to climb again. The sun had warmed the south facing ridge we were moving on and we went straight up it. After a lot of sweating, we reached the ridge at the top of Long Canyon and get a view of Ruby Dome and the other monster peaks of the range.

The Infamous Ruby Dome

We are now on the crest ridge and ready to move and move we did. We were practically running along the barren ridge and were driven like two kids in a candy shop. Upon topping out on a small peak we look down on the saddle and see a herd of mountain goats. Just looking at their tracks and where they had been scared me and I envy their mountaineering skills!

Mountain goats standing on the edge of the world.

We finally stopped moving when we realized that we were about to bonk. We had been moving non stop and covered over 9 miles. We found a clump of trees to hunker down behind and spent the rest of Valentine's day at 10,500 feet enjoying some classy dehydrated meals.

Tune in later for the the final day of action!