Now, by the time that our schedules and weather finally aligned for this, it felt pretty attainable. Tessa had also been eyeing this run called Little Alien couloir, which rose up right from Chair Peak Lake, so we added that to our goal for the day. Little Alien has a pretty narrow choke at the top of the couloir that requires aggressive jump turning, and this is a skill that we both had been practicing before this tour. We were excited to try to put it to the test on this couloir that, while intimidating, has a great runout.

We got to the parking lot at 7am, geared up quick, and were on our way by 7:15. We made quick work of the skin up to Snow Lake Divide, and within an hour found ourselves at our first decision point of the day. Our "A" list descent down to Snow Lake was to ski the North face of Chair. This consists of rolling knolls, and a skiers left traverse down to a steep descent which spits you out at the west end of Snow lake. Pretty efficient for the circumnavigation's sake. Our "B" route was to ski from the North Face down Cache couloir, which we had both skied with Dan when we skied Holy Diver. And our "C" goal was to just ski across the divide and all the way across the lake.

What made this decision tricky at the time was that we had been skinning up to the divide in thick clouds (see pic next to the first paragraph). We were guessing that the clouds were staying low, as there was an inversion forecasted for today, however the thought of skiing the North face of Chair in a whiteout was making us not so stoked. We decided to continue up and see what the clouds did, since we knew that we could ski our "B" goal relatively easily if we needed to. As we skinned up to the Thumbtack, we were pretty elated to find that the clouds had cleared and we found ourselves overlooking the cloudy inversion below us in the valley. Perfect. We felt confident enough to go ski the direct North face of Chair. We didn't ski it as directly as we'd like (take a look at my strava track below if you're curious to see where we went), as we went up the couloir directly to the North of the Thumbtack, which put us a little too skiers right to make it perfectly direct. Next time, we would have wanted to look into the couloir just west of the Thumbtack, which we think would have given us a more direct line.

From the lake, we knew we only had one more ascent to do. We grabbed a snack, and started skinning on up to get to the Bryant-Chair col. We skinned on up in the baking sun, and saw some climbers making use of the shade and attempting to climb Hot Tubbs, which is an ice climb up the West face of Bryant. However, it didn't look like it was very in, and the climbers seemed to be bailing off the climb as we passed them up the col. We got up to the col pretty quick, and I looked at my watch. We had only been moving for 5.5 hours. Awesome! A faster day than we were expecting. We ripped skins and started heading down the Bryant couloir. The exit of the couloir was the last "crux" of our tour, as we were doing this relatively early season, and we weren't entirely sure of the best way to exit the col. We had some awesome turns down the top half, cruised the middle section, and then got to our last decision point. We saw most of the tracks heading down - the standard exit when the couloir is in. We saw only a couple of tracks heading off left.