Chephren Couloir

Chephren Couloir - A -17c start with very light snow with light winds and full cloud coverage that remained throughout the day. The beginning of the bootpack up had a good amount of firm sections from sloughing compaction and allowed for pretty quick travel uphill until about the halfway point where it all turned to hell. We found very isolated pockets of windslab on the sides of the chute that we avoided - but didn't find a cohesive slab sitting over the facet bed through the middle, so that's where we stayed. When breaking through this firmer layer near the top of the snowpack, it was all facets below, which made for a huge effort to ascend. Going uphill was barely possible. No sloughs hit us just a lot of spindrift. We topped over 6 hours later. It was -8c at 2500m. The ski quality down started very poorly, got OK, then ended with excellent ski quality on the fan. Slough was easy to manage throughout. A great day out but much more effort than I would normally go for, and I like exercise!