Trip Report: The Rabbit Hole, Mt. Alice
- Dominic Rickicki
- Oct 19, 2024
- 8 min read
Before I even left the Tetons I had my next ski trip planned. With a one day turn around after arriving home from Jackson I was in Rob's living room with him and Kirtis, packing our bags to overnight in Wild Basin in Rocky Mountain National Park.
As an Estes Park resident, obscure ski lines like the Rabbit Hole are kind of always in your periphery. You ski so many of the plumb lines in RMNP each season and those weird far off ones start sneaking up on you as you seek new terrain. For me this line was a top one on the list as I had looked over to it so many times from Longs Peak and Mt. Meeker, and it's minimal beta/descents intrigued me. Although thinking about a line and skiing it are two very different tasks. Finding a partner for lines like this is always a bit of a challenge, especially in a town full of rock climbers that mostly ski only to survive winter, and because there are so many good lines half the distance from the trailhead.
This season I got lucky though as my best friend Rob called me and said, "there's a weather window and I want to ski Mt. Alice." I knew I couldn't pass it up, even though my body was torched from being in the Tetons, and spending two weeks guiding in Silverton just before that. His reasons largely revolved around the fact he had just finished a new 5.12 free climb on the East Face of Mt. Alice and spent so much time on the mountain in summer he wanted a winter trip too. That said, I know he's always down for a weird mountain adventure and probably could've been convinced to ski it anyways if he was in the mood. Since he called me though, there was no turning back, I may not find a partner again for a while.
Even though it was technically spring now, the road to the Wild Basin Trailhead is still closed 2 miles up because of snow. Tacking this onto our adventure we had 9 or 10 miles to get to the base of the mountain. The ski line is North facing, narrow and protected on all sides by high walls, but there's an east facing snowfield above it that catches first sun, so we knew we needed to be in and out of there early before that warmed up. Because of all this we chose to overnight below the peak so we could be up early to ski the line.
The Wild Basin road was mostly melted out and slushy, so we shouldered our packs at the gate, with skis on our backs, and started hoofing it in our running shoes from the Trailhead. We started around 1:00pm and hoped to be up there before sunset to set up camp. Pretty quickly after leaving the actual trailhead and hiking up the trail we were on our skis and skinning for the rest of the journey.
The last time I was on the trail towards Thunder Lake was in 2016 when I did a mid-winter overnight trip with my friend Joe and we built a snowcave to live in while we were out there. On that trip, no trail was broken and we had a pretty brutal time putting the trail in over those couple of days. This trip we got lucky as climbing rangers had skinned to the cabin at Thunder Lake a few days prior and put in a track, which made our travel pretty swift up to just before the lake.
Before Thunder Lake we found an open hole in the stream and filled our water and rested our backs from the overnight packs. I had just guided several overnights in the San Juans and I was a bit more tuned up to heavy pack slogging so I had some ammo for shit talking Rob and Kirtis as we all belly-ached about our bags. Honestly though I was pretty cooked still from all the mounting fatigue of the last month.
At this point we left the trail to cross a shallow ridge to the basin below Mt. Alice. We had some weird route finding over this and were slowly losing steam but we rolled up to the base with plenty of light left. Rob had a boulder he'd been bivying under during the summers he was working on the route that he said, "was the best bivy in the park." Well we found the spot and it was amazing, but it was filled with over six feet snow. So we dug out a shallow pit under the roof of the boulder to sleep in and hung out and made dinner.
From this spot you can't see the Rabbit Hole, in fact unless you have a birds eye view from the North you cant see it all while approaching it. I had some questions about what the lower part of the route looked like. We knew it was potentially the crux as reports say it melts out to 4th class rock and ice. We brought a light short rope, a few ice screws, and a few pins to deal with this, but at this point in the season I was so over skiing with technical gear on my back I really wanted to find an excuse to cut weight. So as the light was fading I skinned up solo to the base of the route to check things out, I was amazed that even from directly below the line I couldn't see the couloir, but I could see that crux, and it was all snow. Hell yeah.
I skied 1,000 ft. of refrozen corn, that was actually quite pleasant, back down to the guys and let them know my discovery. We would drop the ice screws and some of the rack, but still bring the rope in case it was hollow and steep there and we couldn't actually ski it. Psyched, we enjoyed the fading light of the evening together and took in the silence and emptiness of one of the lesser travelled corners of the park.
The next morning we woke up just at sunrise. We only had 2,000 ft. to the summit from here so we weren't worried about being up too early, we just needed to be out before it got hot. I rolled over to my Jetboil I had pre-melted some snow in and went to fire it up to make breakfast. As I turned the stove on nothing happened... I looked over at the other two and quickly realized that I left the canister attached all night and the gas all leaked out. My shit talking came back to bite me. Thankfully I convinced everyone it was good idea to fill our water the evening before so we didn't have to do it in the morning. So we at least had water, but it was frozen bars for breakfast to get us going.
We slid into cold ski boots, made our morning rounds, secured camp, and started skinning out to the base. As we skinned, Alpenglow drenched the East Face of Mt. Alice while Rob pointed out features of his rock climb to us in the perfect light. It was a pleasant albeit groggy start to our day.
At the base of the route, where I had stopped the night prior, we transitioned to crampons and worked our way up the apron. A few micro-route finding blunders had us post-holing in snow that hadn't fully froze overnight, but we eventually made our way back to the firm stuff and sped up again.
At the crux we found good deep snow, but it was tight and very steep. We figured we could maybe side slip it on the way down but we weren't sure. Sometimes when you're boot packing things seem more intense to ski than when you actually have skis on. I was also carrying the rope in my pack and ready to ditch it so I suggested we just sling a horn, hang the rope and have it ready for ourselves when we get back down to that spot, so we did and then continued up to our first views of the couloir.
The Rabbit Hole is a steep and narrow cleft that magically splits an otherwise un-skiable cliff band. It is aptly named. When we first got eyes on it we started to froth a bit more, it was gorgeous and so far the snow was good. As we booted up, the snow was getting firm, but we were getting what my friend Josh likes to call, "revitalized pow". Essentially cold shady snow sits there during high pressure and facets on the surface, thus transforming a once board hard wind slab into a softer skiable surface again. So we trudged on.
Climbing the couloir was work, not because of post-holing, but we were all tired from the ski into the base yesterday, tired from an early morning, lacking breakfast, and feeling the altitude a bit. We took turns breaking trail and eventually popped out of the hole to the summit snowfield. We continued up the snowfield until it ended 100 feet below the summit. We dropped our packs, all looked at each other to see who would say it first, and then all agreed. Fuck this, we're stopping here. So we laughingly went all that way and never continued the 100 feet to the top. We ran out of snow and with it ran out our care to keep hiking. So we had a snack enjoyed our spot and got ready to drop in. Besides we were here to ski, not to be mountaineers right?
The turns off the top were a great warm-up for sore legs. A mellow and broad slope with good snow conditions to get ourselves perched above the hole. We were able to make turns down into the top of the couloir but after a couple hundred feet we hit the first crux of the run. The couloir tightened to its narrowest and steepest point, it would have been wide enough for turns, but the wind had sculpted a large ridge down half of the hallway and cut off our width even more. I tip toed into it, made one turn to set up and then side stepped around the wind feature until it was wide enough for turns again, a bummer, but it was realistically a small part of the couloir, and better to side slip than to slip and slide. From here we enjoyed good steep turns out the couloir with perfect edge grip back to our rope.
I hit the rope first, had my harness on already, clipped in and zipped down it. Halfway down the rap I realized we not only could have easily side slipped that spot, but there was maybe even a turn there. But we only brought a 30m rope so the rap was short and really didn't detract from the ski that much. Rob and Kirtis followed suit and then made sweet turns out the apron in old sun warmed pow. We regrouped at a basin below the line psyching and then dropped in and skied 1,000 feet of perfect corn in about 2 minutes back to the bivy site.
Elated from our ski we were able to pack up camp casually as all the stress left our bodies. We were out of water at this point but knew open streams were a short ski away. We skied out some pretty sweet turns to rejoin the Thunder Lake trail and slog back to the Trailhead. From here we had work in front of us. Even on skis the trail out felt endless. The snow became sticky here, we had a lot of shuffling and side stepping to do and any skiing we got was survival skiing at best. The fatigue was setting back in, but we were able to make it back to the trailhead without putting skins back on and that was nice.
We packed our skis on our back, put the trail runners on and hiked back to the car ready to drive to Rockcut for a beer. Another line on the RMNP life list was checked off, and thankfully it went on the first try, because I don't know if I'm skinning back in there again anytime soon. I'm grateful to have shared time in the mountains with two good friends and move on to other weird lines in the park I've been looking at over the years. Ultimately the Rabbit Hole was a worthy and wild adventure in a quiet corner of the backyard.
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