Skiing Father Dyer Peak’s Northeast Couloir, Blue River, Colorado
Mike and I had time for one last ski day before heading to Peru for three weeks. We decided to find a line off the northeast face of Father Dyer Peak in Blue River that wasn’t in any guide books. Our friends Kat and Hans joined us. We parked at the Spruce Creek Trailhead in Blue River early on a weekend morning. We started skinning from the parking lot up Crystal Creek Road towards Francie’s Cabin. Once we passed the turn off to the cabin, we continued straight up to Lower Crystal Lake. We started getting views of our options on Father Dyer.
After some discussion, we decided to ski a lookers right line on the face, which was one of the few options that didn’t get cliffed out at some point, and we would actually be able to make it to the ridge. We skinned up the short, steep shot to the west of Lower Crystal Lake and contoured around some rocks to make it to the bottom of the line. This was our transition point so we put on boot crampons and took out our ice axes to start hiking up the couloir.
Once again, Mike was in the lead. When we got to the top, we transitioned and felt ready to start the ski descent as things were starting to warm pretty quickly.
While the couloir wasn’t one of the longer ones I’ve skied, it was fairly steep with an average angle somewhere in the low 40 degree range. There was one choke point where the slope rolled over a bit that I would guess was in the high 40s. The snow was probably a little softer than desired, but it was a fun ski nevertheless. Once we got to the bottom of the couloir and regrouped, we decided it was probably too warm to ski another line so we just headed back to the trailhead the same way we came.
Overall, it was a really fun day. I went into the day with low expectations as we weren’t sure what lines would be ski-able and we ended up skiing a steep couloir with decent snow conditions. I’d like to come back up to this area in the future to do some more exploring.
Stats: 6.4 miles, 2900 ft of elevation gain
