The cure for crust is the Alpine Crawl, which is preformed just like you might imagine, by crawling up a slope on your hands and knees.  There is some booting involved, but the idea is to spread your weight out over your hands and shins so you get a little bit of extra flotation.

You can motor right along with an Alpine Crawl, but it gets tiring.  Fortunately, that perfectly awful zone never seems to last too long – it either tightens up and become supportable 200lb crust, or softens up to the point where it might be easier to switch back to skins. In the meantime, get on your knees and crawl.

180lb Courtney up to his 'nads in 150lb crust and loving it.

The disheartening thing about brutal booting is that it usually means the skiing is going to be pretty jacked as well, but not always…

Just keep thinking light thoughts on each turn.  ;)

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Baffin Island Iceberg Camp – 2002

While watching a Mike Libecki slideshow on Big Wall climbing in Baffin Island, I kept catching glimpses of tasty looking couloirs in the background of scenic photos and wondered if they were skiable.  As it turned out, most of the descents off of the huge vertical walls were by walking/sliding down nearby couloirs.  When I asked another skier/climber who had been to Baffin how many of these couloirs there were in the area, he said “Oh God! Hundreds!”  That was all the info needed to start planning a trip to the area.

In 2002, Brad Barlage and I spent four weeks in the Sam Ford Fjord area of Baffin Island doing some of the best skiing of our lives.  In this photo, we had moved camp to an area with 3-4 chutes in it and found a melted out iceberg which had drifted over from Greenland.  It’s good to camp near icebergs as they are a source of clean water for melting, but in this case, we were worried about an avalanche coming down the couloir and nailing the berg like a perfect catcher’s mitt, burying us in the process.

In the end, it was just too cool a campsite to pass up and the snow was stable enough that we spent two nights camped there.  At one point, some of the berg itself calved off and almost hit Brad, but aside from that, it was excellent.

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