For over a year now, I have been hearing about the Jackson Tour. This past weekend Garrett (the Jackson Tour’s namesake), Rick and I decided to go and give it a try. It turned out to be a great decision. The Jackson Tour is a loop trip through 3 passes near the North Fork Teanaway.
The trip did not start out all that promising. A big patch of snow blocked the Teanaway Road about 1/2 mile from the Iron Peak trailhead. Skis on our packs, we headed down the road to the trailhead. We ended up hiking up the Iron Peak trail for about 1000ft vertical before we found continuos snow and could put the skis on.
We skinned up to the pass below Iron Peak. At the pass we had a fantastic view into the Beverly Creek drainage.
We skied down from Iron Peak in the Beverly Creek drainage and then headed north to the Beverly-Turnpike pass (pass #2). Where we got our first views of Mt Stuart and rest of the Stuart range. It was great ski down one of the gullies to Turnpike Creek.
From there we headed up towards Longs Pass. It was pretty easy going up a beautiful valley (and a view all the way into eastern washington). We headed towards Longs Pass and ended up finding a nice cornice free spot just a little bit down the ridge from pass. We spread out and headed up and over the ridge one at at time. Despite being late in the day, the snow was very stable.
We had 2nd lunch on the ridge top, until we noticed the very dark clouds coming our way and quickly got on our way. We had to down-climb about 20 yards from the top of the ridge to find snow. It was a fantastic ski down the open slopes and the woods to the Ingalls Lake trailhead.
We were able to ski the road for about a mile, but then had to put the skis back on the pack and walk back to the car.
The snow conditions were stable all day long. There was evidence of some large cornice releases and wet slab avalanches from prior days. We ended up seeing maybe 10 people the entire day and we had the Beverly and Turnpike creek drainages all to ourselves.