The Hand

Ryan and I set out on Saturday morning with a leisurely 730 start intending on skiing near/on the Hand in the Absaroka range.  The hand is an intriguing feature descending from a northerly sub ridge of Mount Delano.  Accessing the Hand is difficult and proved to be troublesome and challenging.  Situated 3400' above a drainage with no public access, some trickery and old fashioned suffering was in order to access this feature.

After snowfall the evening before, clouds break at our starting point

We left the car by 830 climbing up and out of Suce Creek and begining our first descent into the North Fork of Deep Creek.  We joked about the name, Deep Creek as we got deeper and deeper into the wilds.  Soon after entering this drainage, we got our first view of the Hand.

Ryan scopes the ascent for the hand.  "I guess we'll just skin up that forested hill-slope"

We did just that, skinning up the forested slopes that butressed the feature.  The skinning was heinous for many hours with faceted, junky snow making each step challenging.

"Please dont tell me we have to ski down 3k of this!"

We arrived at the top of the hand by 3pm or so in a whiteout.  Looking down the face which required intricate route finding and serious consequences we weighed the options.  The snowpack was suspect and our line of descent questionable.  We decided to opt for the safe yet heinous option. Skiing back down the skin track through the forest of despair.  We had a few good powder turns in the forest but the deadfall down low was pure misery.  I cannot wait to go back!  We'll wait a little longer for this one to shape up in spring conditions.  See an excellent write up on Turiano's site at this LINK

Tauntingly, the clouds lift and the Hand shows itself as we retreat