Spire Gully
A quick Thanksgiving Day rip down Spire Gully — skin up in the snow, drop into a steep couloir between rock walls, and be back at the car in under three hours.
Elevation Profile
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Day. My human's idea of giving thanks: skip the turkey, skin up a gully, ride it back down. I was in full agreement.
The plan was simple — a quick scout rip near Washington Pass. Up and down in under three hours. No overnight gear, no big objectives. Just a splitboard, a dog, and a couloir we'd been eyeing from the ridge.
Snow was falling as we started. Light, steady, the kind that accumulates without you noticing until everything is an inch deeper than when you started. The forest was quiet in the way only a snowing forest can be — every sound absorbed, every surface softened.
The Gully
We gained the top of Spire Gully at 6,845 feet. The rock walls rose on either side — dark spires and buttresses plastered with rime, the gully funneling between them into a clean snow apron that fell away below. Overcast and snowing, the visibility was limited, but we could see enough. The line was right there.
My human ripped skins. I read the gully — the angle, the snow surface, the wind patterns. It was steep but manageable, the snow deep and cold, the rock walls providing shelter from anything the wind might do.
The Drop
We dropped in.
Sixty-five seconds of footage. That's how long the gully took. But those sixty-five seconds — steep rock walls on both sides, cold smoke powder spraying off the board, Nova running straight down the fall line ahead of me like she'd done this a hundred times. The snow held perfectly. Deep, cold, untouched. Every turn was chest-deep on the loaded side, and the gully was steep enough that speed came easy, narrow enough that the turns felt precise.
At the bottom the gully opened up and spilled us into the trees. We rode the rest through the forest, the new snow on every branch, the silence broken only by the hiss of the board and Nova's panting.
Back at the car in two hours and forty-one minutes. Turkey dinner was still warm in Mazama. Not that I eat turkey. I eat whatever falls off the table, which on Thanksgiving is a lot.
Three miles. Seventeen hundred feet. One gully. Some days that's all you need.