North Ridge of Pfeifferhorn

Overview

On April 2, 2022, Craig Pierson and I summited Pfeifferhorn via the North Ridge in winter/spring conditions. We skied off the summit with rapidly warming snow, but successfully got back to the car without incident.

I felt horrible all day, pretty much from the moment we left. I had nightmares and slept only a few hours, tossing and turning. I even overslept (AM/PM malfunction) and was late to meet Craig at the park and ride. Sorry Craig :(

Notwithstanding my struggles, we made the best of it and had a beautiful day out with engaging climbing (engaging for ski boots at least).

Weather & Conditions

The day started cool, warming considerably by the afternoon. We found nice powder in shaded and treed aspects, including the Maybird Headwall. All sun affected slopes kicked off pretty large sized wet sluffs. Snow contained some graupel from a previous storm, and some dirty snow from the latest dusting a few days earlier. There was some also strong wind on the ridge.

Elevation, Mileage, and Timing

We certainly didn't set any speed records with my pace. The car to car time was 7:06. Unfortunately I forgot my watch that day and Strava sucks if you use your phone to record so I had to use my photos to discern segments.

From my photos, we started moving around 7:25 AM, we got to the base of the couloir to gain the ridge around 10:15-10:30, gained the ridge around 11:10 AM, and summited around 1:10 PM.

So roughly, 3 hours to gain the couloir, about 45 minutes booting up, and about 2 hours climbing.

North ridge of Pfeifferhorn - John Sigmon’s 10.3 mi backcountry ski

Shit sleep, felt like shit on the skin. Rewarded with scary turns off the summit and fantastic turns into Maybird.

Notes

Overall the day went off without a hitch. I felt pretty bad on the skin, which went away afterwards. You can only climb so fast in ski boots and so I couldn't get my heart rate up high enough to feel bad again. Booting up the couloir was an unfortunate time. The snow was quite wind loaded down low, with sections of pure sugar up high. We just about had to start tunneling through waist deep sugar to gain the ridge.

The climbing was good. I've done the north ridge in the summer and it is an especially loose route. I thought it might be a little more glued together this time around, but I was surprised at how loose it still was.

None of the climbing was particularly scary, I'm not sure how I'd even rate it on an M scale. Likely M3+ or 4- were the hardest moves, considering there are a few steep sections, if only for a body length or two.

The snow scramble to the summit was also pretty sugary and terrible. We got to the summit likely just in time. We let down some pretty good sized point releases under our skis as we came down, which kept you from side slipping anything. The top four inches or so of snow was sliding off the icy surface underneath, until it would bunch up and then you'd have to make a jump turn. So I got my first experience doing jump turns in very consequential terrain. We took turns going down to the Maybird headwall, where we got some nice powder down into Maybird Gulch.

Photos