Mt. Dade 11,732′

I skied Mt.Dade with a customer named Tucker maybe around 2000. The Moynier book called it an all day tour. He categorized his peaks as half day, full day, or multi day. I’ll let you be the judge if this is all day or more than that, when you consider 3 miles of groomed XC highway, to 7 miles of flat valley and 1000′ climb, and THEN go 3500′ or so up to 13,600′. We took 3 hours skinning all the way to a bivy and skied the peak in the morning. We had the advantage of kicker skins and no tent. I woke up soaking wet from Dew while Tucker was dry by just sleeping under some tree branches. Ok, now I know!

We skinned up the steep choke into a lower angle high south facing bowl, before leaving skis and walking about 500′ of rock scree to the summit .We skied good powder to our frozen campsite and then tried to go up the Cats Ears Couloirs next. Oddly this nearby slope was too hard to boot up. We sank to our chest and we didn’t want to start playing avalanche forecaster. I don’t think we had even taken an avy course at that point. I would recognize the snow conditions now. Glad we just listened to our gut back then.

I know we skied out by skate skiing, and didn’t put the kicker skins back on. But this is a flat valley. Bring Kickers. We sell em for about $85. They open the doors up to so many new ski tours further from the car where you’ll have the mountains to yourself.