About Lake Tahoe - Hiking - Backcountry Skiing on Jobs Sister

The Vitals elev.-10,663 Rock-Shale like scree Part of the Carson Range
click here for photos
Click here for Topo Maps (Heavenly side, Jobs side)

1/21/04-Today we decide to take a tour from the top of Heavenly Valley to Job's Sister, and then out to High Meadows Trail.. It's been about 30 hours since Heavenly received six inches from a backside storm. This was by far the largest storm total in the basin so we decided to keep it close to the Heave. Additionally, dropping off the backside of Monument Peak is something best experienced after an east wind. After a few delays we made it to the top of Monument Peak by about 10:45. Here we drop into about 1200 feet of great fall line through wind stunted trees. The snow is great but opening it up completely is scary as its a bit of a mine field. From here, we follow the Rim Trail (sort of) to Star Lake. Directly across the damn we head up the ridgeline keeping on the windpack near the edge of the drop down to the lake. We make it to the top of the bowl between Jobs Sister and Freel Peak, but opt for the tree line we passed a couple hundred yards before. It was an excellent choice, 2,200 hundred feet of beautifully spaced trees in bottomless powder. Here we begin a series of traverses to skiers left combined with sweet shots with another 1,100 feet of vertical. We finish it up with a speed run down well used path with about an inch on top of ice. As tired as we were, and with the sun already behind the Crystal Range, this was the hardest part of the day. The tour took 6.5 hours and we were rewarded with about 4,500 vertical feet of downhill skiing for about 2,500 of fairly easy mostly non-technical (okay, somehow I was able to find some bushwahcking even with a 100+ inch base) climbing.

When entering the backcountry, proper precautions should be taken, including avalanche beacon and the know-how to use it, shovel, compass or GPS, friend, weather information, and common sense. Click here for the latest avalanche advisory info. You can also find more info on our gear pages.

Ski Aware, It's Big out there.