Watrous Bowl, Woods Mountain, Bakerville, Colorado
After a day with some pretty bad conditions on Buckskin Couloir, Mike and I were ready for a day of spring corn skiing. So the following day we decided to check out Watrous Bowl on Woods Mountain with some friends. We parked at the Herman Gulch Trailhead off of I-70 around 7:30 am to begin our ascent. We had to walk a good chunk of the first mile from the trailhead due to lack of snow. Once we hit the snow line, we were able to keep our skis on for the rest of the ascent.
As we got further into Watrous Gulch, with Mount Parnassus on our right, we started getting some nice views of the bowl we were hoping to ski. There were quite a few available options. We decided we would ski a line more towards lookers left in the bowl so we took the western ridge up to the top of Woods Mountain. We ran into another group up here that were going to ski a different line.
After a snack, the snow seemed to be perfectly softened so we decided to begin our descent. Views on the way down were so beautiful they were distracting at times. We headed down one at a time and were delighted that we timed our descent well and found ourselves enjoying some spring corn turns. We made our way back down to tree line where we decided to put our skis on our packs and hike back down to the trailhead.
Overall, it was a perfect bluebird day with great skiing. I’ll be interested to try some other lines in the future on this mountain.
Total stats: 5.9 miles, 2530 ft of elevation gain
