“It requires you to think, to circumvent conditions,” he says. Just before they cliff out, however, the snow ramps up on skier’s right into a frozen wave-sometimes corniced, sometimes just a hump of snow-that connects that step’s bottom to the top of the next.ĭoug Robinson, who has spent a lifetime climbing, skiing and documenting life in the Sierra Nevada, believes the Giant’s Steps has the classic signs of mountaineering quality. The thought of skiing such lines did not occur to the average American skier until Chris Landry’s out-of-context definition of extreme skiing took root, wherein “…if you fall, you die.” The Giant’s Steps certainly offers that possibility: the route’s first two pitches end by flushing over granite into space.
Now that the route’s entrance is known, the Giant’s Steps is commonly done as an exhausting, single-day, 8,000-vertical-foot loop starting with a bushwhack in lower Bairs Creek, up the eastern slopes to the summit, then diagonally down the north face to Williamson Creek and back out to sagebrush on the desert floor.
#SUMMIT WHITE REDLINE TRAVERSE PLUS#
Each step is hidden from the next.”ĭave Braun’s first descent required four trips over a six-week period to piece the puzzle together, starting out at the Shepherd Pass trailhead and studying it from the ridge between Symmes and Shepherd Creeks, then the ridge forming Williamson Creek’s north boundary, plus a direct attempt from the bottom of the face in Williamson Creek.
“You have to keep something in reserve, because the first two cliff out, and you can’t see the whole line. “There’s no other descent like it, but the crux is knowing where the entrance is,” Tahoe-based guide Brennan Lagasse said after skiing Giant’s Steps with my cousin, Jeff Dostie. It makes you wonder, ‘How did that happen?’ It’s long and beautiful and aesthetic and totally unique.” “It really hit me after skiing it last year-it’s three couloirs in one,” he says. And everyone I’ve spoken with agrees with Morrison’s assessment. The more critical part was figuring the route out.īesides skiing all of California’s 14ers, John Morrison has returned to Giant’s Steps three times, two shy of Braun’s five descents. The improvement in gear was part of the equation. When Dave Braun made the first descent of the Giant’s Steps couloir over Memorial Day weekend 1998, he wore SCARPA’s plastic T2 telemark boot. “I believe I did the second descent on tele gear and arguably the only tele turns ever made in the Giant’s Steps.” But, as is the case today, no one cares if you tele. “Braun agreed to do a ‘rerun’ for photos,” Craig Dostie says. Interest in backcountry skiing exploded in the ’90s, in part due to the enthusiasm created by plastic telemark boots.ĭave Braun hopping into the third of the Giant’s Steps in June 1998 on Mt. While people like Bard, Carter and Bela Vadasz were proving it was possible to pull off such descents on freeheel gear, some behind the scenes were tinkering with plastic telemark boots that might expand such feats from the athletically gifted to the athletically inclined. Whitney’s Mountaineers Route and Sierra classics like the Bloody and Dana Couloirs.
Before the ’80s were over, the capability of telemark gear had been proven on descents of the U- and V-Notch under North Palisade peak, Mt. In the same decade, Bela and Mimi Vadasz began incorporating as much of the holistic, European mountain attitude as they dared in their Sierra-based guiding program, Alpine Skills International. Soon after Dave Beck established the now classic Sierra High Route in 1975, Tom Carter, Allan Bard and Chris Cox pioneered the Redline traverse, logging descents along the Sierra Crest that were alpine in nature and Nordic in execution. Williamson and, in the late ’70s, Galen Rowell and Kim Schmitz skied the south side on skinny skis, pins and leather boots Schmitz’s arm was even in a cast. Los Angeles’s Ski Mountaineers Section of the Sierra Club led semi-regular ski tours on Mt.
While occasional early tours traversed Williamson’s flanks, they were infrequent and definitely didn’t reach the north side. The thought of skiing anything on the north wall of Williamson probably didn’t occur with any measure of regularity until the ’80s. With no established trails, access is a catch-22 of dense underbrush choking the natural routes up George, Bairs and North Bairs Creeks, making passage with skis a gauntlet of frustration. Williamson’s is the Eastside’s largest massif, rising from 6,000 feet on the east to 14,370 feet on the west and encompassing all the mass between George Creek to the south and Williamson Creek to the north.
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