Quandary Peak 14,265'

Yesterday I met up with Dane, a friend from the OSU Mountain Club. He's currently living at his parents vacation home in Frisco, a few miles north of Breckenridge. We'd been planning to ski Quandary Peak as soon as we had a good weather day that corresponded with one of Dane's days off. He called me up on Tuesday and said the weather would be good enough on Wednesday, so I drove up to Summit County to meet him. The trailhead was only about 15 minutes from his place, and the summit a scant 2.5 miles from the trailhead. It took us about 3 hours to gain 3400 feet and make the summit. I was able to ski the entire way up the mellow east ridge, while Dane snowshoed and carried his snowboard. At the summit we found blue skies without a breath of wind. We couldn't have asked for better weather. We skied two nice bowls off the north side of the ridge on the way back down. We hiked back up and skied the lower bowl twice. The snow was a mixture of windblown crust and ice, but I was able to drop a knee a few times and keep the crashing to a minimum. Oh yea, making tele turns at 14,000 feet is exhausting. The last picture shows the upper bowl that we skied.