Cody Townsend’s The Fifty is a project worth devoting some time to and appreciating the tremendous things some athletes commit themselves to. It’s a straightforward but daunting mission: climbing and skiing all 50 lines chronicled in The 50 Classic Descents of North America. It’s been almost five years now and he’s crossed 44 of those lines off the list, some without much fuss while others have required a zen-like patience to tackle. The couloir at Split fits into the latter.
Situated in the Eastern Sierra, Split (and Townsend’s experience with it) fits a description perfectly articulated by our Sr. Editor, Joe Carberry.
“They don’t just let you climb them, then shred any face you’d like. No, they have personality,” he said earlier this year when talking to Townsend about this entire project.
To Townsend, who approaches it all with an understanding that each mountain has its own energy and its own personality, the Split couloir always felt spooky — his exact wording.
“This line gives me the Willies,” he says. The climb alone is pretty gnarly but the aesthetics of the line are deceiving, grabbing your attention and begging to be skied when you see them from a distance. But it’s claimed lives and that’s a reality that weighs heavy on Townsend, no matter how well he can articulate all the conditions that make Split so gnarly. The north facing wall of the couloir sees a lot of boulders drop — something you’d never want at an inopportune moment — while the south facing wall heats up quickly under the sun. It has to be the right temperature, the right winds, the right snowpack, and those factors alone forced Townsend and Nick Russell to wait a full three years before they could even plan a safe attempt.
“It wasn’t until a historic winter — a winter for the record books in the Sierra — that our focus turned back to Split. After three years of waiting,” Townsend says.
Like we mentioned, it’s one of those mountains that doesn’t just let you climb and then shred any line you want.
