Helen Shoulder

Another trip into the Helen Shoulder glades, this time with a more straightforward approach.

Last time in the area, Joanne and I had parked at the Crowfoot Glacier lookout parking lot, and hence the approach was a lot longer than it needed to be.

After looking through a few maps and google maps, I wanted to try this trip again with an alternate starting point (which you'll see in the GPS data below).

The forest was fairly dense, but we managed to find our way to the Helen Creek trail, which we followed for a bit before heading up to higher ground.

On the Helen Creek trail

At times, the slope was too steep to go straight up, and the snow was quite faceted, making for tough traversing. We ended up overshooting the upper bowl by a little bit, but came across a track that went up to the top of the ridge.

The snow was not as stable as I had hoped, with a bit of settling and cracking, even in the trees. We chose not to follow the ridge very far, and instead dropped down to the first open slope and skied it down to the bottom of the bowl, where we had lunch.

We had some time commitments, so decided to ski straight down, more or less, towards the road, to see where we would end up. Our exit was about 200m uphill from the car, so the rest of the way was quite easy.

Back at the car

In hindsight, our parking spot was pretty close to perfect, but our uptrack could be a bit more efficient. Furthermore, there seem to be some open areas that we missed on the way down, so we'll need to angle more to skier's left to take advantage of those slopes.

http://www.endomondo.com/workouts/160370299/3101909