After digging a bit and testing the slope itself, however, we found the slope itself it to be quite stable, but noted the strangeness of the skintrack for later in the day. We got to the summit of Crystal Peak, a peak that in the summer is usually covered in hikers, but today was completely empty. We peered down the North side, still unsure of the stability. With Dan's snow saw, we decided to cut a cornice to see if it triggered anything. Dan sliced and... Nothing. Awesome. We skied down the ridge a bit, and decided to make a ski cut to test it further. I dropped in this time, and again nothing but slough. We skied down to the entrance of the couloir and peered down. Oof - steep and narrow! It was what we wanted to challenge ourselves with today, and we were excited. We noted one constriction where we weren't entirely sure how or if we could ski around it. The only way to find out was to go check, so I took off down the couloir and we stopped at a safe spot so that Dan could have a visual on me as I skied down.

I took a couple of fun zippy turns, and slowed down as I approached the rocky constriction. Practicing my hop turn form, I positioned myself as narrow as my skis would allow, and found that the rocky constriction was too narrow to side-step down. Hmm. I peered below the bulge and found that the couloir stays quite narrow past it as well. Not much room for error if I were to straight-line it and turn to stop. The snow was powdery and forgiving, so I sat at the constriction for a bit, considered the possibility of straight-lining it, and ultimately, I wimped out. Instead, I down-stepped as low as I possibly could on the rocky outcrop, sat down on the snow, swung my skis around it, and stood up safely at the bottom of the bulge. Skiing down to our meeting spot, I felt a bit like a gumby having swung around in that way, but used that energy to make me determined to practice and get better at getting past narrow constrictions like that. I had done it safely, it just didn't look good. "All clear!" I said on the radio. "Okay, dropping!" replied Dan. He made a couple of nice turns down the couloir, and side stepped down to the constriction. He stood at the top like I did for a couple of minutes, and decided to try to straight line it. He sat down in the snow, dug the tails of his skis into the snow, and then leaned into it. He looked solid at first, but then, as he pushed into his turn, whoop! He went over the handlebars.