This is how the schedule has gone so many times this year, far more than ever before, and how it went yesterday morning. I get up at 3:30 AM, sometimes before the alarm goes off and put the teapot on the stove. I check the gear to be sure it is dry enough. The teapot whistles. I pull it off the stove and shut the door to the bedroom so Leia can sleep peacefully through the ritual. I start the mate (mah-tay, I can't figure out the accent on the keyboard!) and put the rest of the hot water in the thermos. I eat, drink mate. I put my climbing skins on my skis so I don't have to do it in the cold. I finish packing my backpack with food, water, shovel, probe, avalanche beacon and a bunch of other stuff that I figure I need because I have forgotten it in the past and wished I didn't. I write down where I am going and with whom I am traveling on the white board, kiss Leia and answer her that I have written down that which I wrote. By 4:30 I have Andrew and Tyler in the truck. We prepare to adjust our altitude. We drink mate. By 5:30 AM we are at the White Pine trailhead with our skis on, except Tyler. We stopped at his house and there were no lights on. He didn't answer his phone either. He called, though, right as we were about to lose reception in Little Cottonwood Canyon. He said he was coming. We told him to go fast and we would tour slowly to start.
On the trail, the cold of the parking lot fades. I remind myself every morning that, even though I am freezing when I'm getting my gear together, once we start skinning my body will warm itself. And it does. The last to lose the coldness are my fingers. Soon enough they are warm too. We work our way up and across the side of the canyon passed the White Pine and the Red Pine drainages. The weather is clear and we look down on the Sandy nightscape and the lights of the few cars going along the bottom of the canyon. By the time we reach the Maybird drainage the sky lightens. It begins with a gradual light blue, and then suddenly the peaks on the north side of the canyon go bright pink. The color is reflected in all the snow around resulting in a dull but discernible glow. Though I've seen it an uncanny number of times this season, it doesn't lose its brilliance. 
We've been breaking trail since the trail split in White Pine- we are the first ones here since the last storm. Everything is uniformly covered in a blanket of white. We are the first to disturb it by cutting a skin track direct as possible to our goal. The extra effort to put in the track made it inevitable for Tyler to catch-up, and he did. As I was relieving myself, reveling in the early morning glow, Tyler came flying around the corner and got an eyefull! He had put on a brutal pace to be able to ski today's line with us. He looked it too, all red and sweaty. He was dripping so hard that icicles were dangling from his beard, breathing hard as an angry, restrained child.
By about nine AM we stood at the top of the Hogum 500. The resorts were opening and folks there were already talking about yesterday's powder. In front of us was over 1500 vertical feet without a track but the one left behind by us. We had been eyeing our line and the approach to it all along our way up the ridge that separates Maybird and Hogum drainages. The top of the Coalpit drainage could be seen just to the right of the top of a long narrow couloir called the Hypodermic Needle, obvious just right-of-center in the photo. To get there we would have to skin up the slope toward the Needle, and, just before the bottom of the narrow section, traverse the slope above the cliffs to the right to access the ridge. The first 1000 ft. of the Coalpit headwall are visible in the photo. But first before we coulkd begin the ascent toward the Needle, someone had to ski all of this glorious powder!By eleven AM the temperature was heating the slopes we were on. The apron of the Needle, where we were putting in our skin track, faces Northeast. It receives morning sun. When the sun firsts hits the slope, the air is still too cold for the snow to be affected. By now it is warm, and the snow has started to change. The top layer is getting moist. It sticks to my climbing skins and ski making me carry an extra ten pounds of weight up the mountain and the skins don't slide smoothly on the snow. Worse, if it gets to wet it could slide out from underneath us. The slope we are going up is the perfect angle to avalanche it the conditions are right.
The scariest part is the traverse above the cliffs. I watch Drew as he moves into the danger zone. The snow here is variable, with most of it in good condition, but some spots are icy where they have been buffed by the wind. In one of these spots Drew kicks out a pin. He says it is a freak occurrence that has only happened a couple of times in all his years of backcountry skiing. Now, perched on an icy spot on a slope over 35 degrees hanging above cliffs and certain death, he reaches down to save one-half of his snowboard from sliding all the way down to the bottom of Hogum Fork while balancing precariously on the other half of the snowboard. Ho got it all under control, put his board back on, and continued skinning to the ridge. 
My turn.
My turn. My program was to overcome the terror and the vertigo and the risk of the snow deciding to slide whilst I was crossing above the cliffs by staring at the three feet of skin-track in front of me and skinning like hell to the ridge. It worked. The dragon left me be again today. At the ridge I had my first view ever from the Coalpit headwall. I smiled knowing that I was going to ski this line. It may take eight hours to get to the top of it and only twenty minutes of skiing (or probably less!) to come down. Every step on the skin track (a reward in itself) is worth it.
The Descent:
First we put our skis on while balancing on the ridge. There are no good spots. I lean against a rock and keep one foot planted in the snow. I have to take my skis off of my backpack, which involves swinging the weight of the pack around me and bumping it into rocks, either of those likely stealing my balance and sending me into the rocks below. Each one goes on like surgery. Worst besides falling myself would be to lose a ski. The only "safe" way down is on top of them. Down below I can see the road in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I think about the dangerous descent and long hike through powder that I would face if I mishandled my ski, take my time and I get everything on without screwing up.
The headwall drops for 1,800 vertical feet. The top section was wind-buffed, icy and required some safety skiing for sure. Some sections were soft, encouraging faster turns, but soon enough turned again to ice. If you wrecked it would be a fast ride to the bottom!
The bottom half of the headwall, brought good powder turning. We pow-wowed for a while to admire the surroundings. None of us had ever been there before, and now we had the whole drainage to ourselves! Underway again we skied another near 2,000 vertical foot shot of the greatest snow on earth, and finished with a narrow gully that rode like a slide at a waterpark that spit you out over a waterfall into the bottom of Little Cottonwood Canyon. In the summer the waterfall makes the entrance into Coalpit nearly impossible. In winter it fills in with snow and is easily skied!
Coalpit Headwall S4
Another great day brought to you by '07-'08!
