The Hanover Collaboration

I was up int Tuckerman’s Ravine yesterday and it was fantastic. Great weather, great snow.

Ton’s of people. Hundreds and hundreds of people. The goofer index was unbelievably high. Goofer index is the sum (over runs) of how far people are out of their league. I would estimate the Goofer index as about 200*(double-black diamond—blue square).

I think that the average eastern skiier is much better than his western counterpart but I never saw anything in Highland bowl that compared to yesterday’s shitshow. About a third of the people ate it and slid or rolled the whole way down. Another third skied it so as to make you concerned.

I did my part for the goofer index. Last run, I went for a waterfall that looked like an 85% move but it turned out to be more like a %30. I lost that lottery and did about 4 somersaults (a small, controlled fall by the day’s standard).

Here is the best story of the day. Second run, we were trying to get to an exotic line (Courtney’s idea, Jon, not mine) to gawker’s left where the snow was a little firmer. The hike had a very long straight section at 45+ degrees. The snow was a 1/16-1/8th inch of ice crust on 3 inches of granular refrozen corn on rock hard boilerplate. There was no bootpack. The refrozen granular was a bit too crumbly to really trust. It was nerve-wracking.

We get to a rock outcrop where we could stop without fear of sliding and look across to standard hiking train next to the headwall. We look just in time to see someone fall and roll. He takes out the person behind him and they take out a third person and so on until it is impossible to tell how many distinct people are in the ball tumbling down the mountain. It doesn’t help the eye that gear is flying out out in every direction. As it stops, it disperses and you could count. Not counting the people who were only temporary components, there were 6 people down at the bottom.

That didn’t help our mental state much.