Quick report
As we walked down the snow covered boulder field, after bailing on our attempt at climbing the Stur Chimney climb, Annie and I decided that summer is over and it is now time to transition to skiing! So with that, I figured I'd start the winter tradition of writing in to share what we saw in the mountains. First off, pretty wild walking through the recent burn in the Bench Lake area, we were calling the ground sludge as we sunk in to our ankles in black goop. The fire has definitely changed the landscape, it will be interesting to see how that will effect the avalanche zones out there. We saw very light holdings of snow once turning onto the Bench Lake trail (@6,700') but it didn't become interesting until we were much higher and on the shady aspects (@8,700'). While ascending from the upper most Bench Lake to the Heyburn Saddle (NE aspect) we found ourselves walking through some snow. Depth ranged from completely dry - about shin deep. It seemed like wind had transported some snow into pockets, and small wind crusts were even found. My initial thought was that this snow is probably around for the rest of the year, although maybe not enough to really make a bad weak layer? Contrasting the shady norths, anything that had seen the sun for a significant portion of the day was bone dry, making us wish our approach was on a different aspect. Welcome back to winter, and hope you all had a great summer!