Colorado Backcountry: Bard Creek Dawn Patrol

Saturday Mike and I met up early. Dawn patrol and scouting for new locations was the plan, we had started hiking by 5:45am. Mike had scoped out a line last year on Mt. Bethel and the ridge to the northwest behind it. We didn't have enough time to make that but we decide to head back into the drainage and see what we could find. Mike had to be on his way out by 10am so are options were limited. We followed the creek back up into the basin and noticed some really nice north facing bowls with open trees and tons of powder. We pointed the snowshoes that direction and started breaking trail. We zig zagged back and forth up through the trees toward our destination, once at the top we geared up, did a quick beacon check and rode down to find a nice spot to dig a pit. Around 11800ft we found a spot for the pit, open trees, north facing, and around 32 degrees slope angle. 4-5 layers, we saw the same conditions as the previous week at Loveland Pass. 2-3ft of depth hoar, below a very weak layer about 3" thick. On top of that, various layers from the storms cycles and large slabs. We got easy shears on the layer roughly 18" below the surface. We decided to ski the mellower slope angle and denser trees to our left vs. the open bowl. The snow was deep and really fun, a bit heavy but you can't complain about powder. Back down in the drainage basin we started the hike out, happy to have found a great new spot. We wished we could have stayed longer and explored some more of the terrain. All in all we logged about 5 miles total and fresh tracks all the way back down.