Mt Abel NE Couloir – Ski Descent

Cool line easily accessible for a quick hit from Kelman hut incorporating some easy mixed climbing up pencil dick gully and a pretty spectacular and exposed ridge traverse over to the top of the couloir. The gully is super fun, 300m at 45 degrees, but because it traverses left across the face and cambers towards the cliff its more exposed than it looks! Once at the bottom either skin up the Murchison headwall, or there are a variety of mixed ice lines from the base direct up to Kelman hut. We took a line that went at M3/WI3 for 2 pitches

Approach

From Kelman skin up the hill south west and cross over almost as far as the col to the west of Mt Abel. This puts you at the bottom of pencil dick gully – the climb varies a lot depending on conditions, but generally the fuller it is the better. For us there was one defined 5m or so crux of M3 mixed with 20-30m or so of WI2 on each side, and otherwise steep (50ish degree) firm snow. From the top of the gully, step onto the south side of the ridge and soak up the sudden exposure down to the Mannering, and traverse up to the summit. The ridge traverse is very cool – knife edged and exposed. We put a running belay between us with some good blocks to weave between.

From the top of the gully you make an exposed traverse across the ridge to this excellent spike belay just before the summit

Alex on the summit of Mt Abel. Its a really cool exposed snow arete between me and him

Descent

With a NE aspect this gets the sun early and so makes for a great early corn lap. We had a good melt freeze cycle on the northerly aspects and the couloir was just releasing around 11am when we dropped in. The ski is at the perfect ‘fun but not scary’ gradient around 45 deg, and the corn was super confidence inspiring so we flew down the line in about 10 minutes. It’s a bit of a nervy line, and despite the steepness not being extreme, it traverses left above a cliff band and is camberd down towards the cliff. From afar it looks like theres a collecting feature on the downhill side of the line, but there isn’t. With every turn your sluff drops off into the void just a few metres to your right, and a fall would most likely send you off the cliff….so don’t get too carried away! Once down the bulk of the 300m vert the gully straightens up and gets narrower, but the exposure disappears.

Alex making turns in the bottom part of the coulolir

In terms of getting back to the hut, skinning up the Murchison headwall is the most obvious route. This is prone to some pretty serious wind loading from the Tasman in W winds though and after a dig the night before in the vicinity we had decided we didn’t want to come back up this way. Luckily there are some super fun mixed routes that take you directly up to Kelman hut and so get around this problem. We aimed for the fattest looking ice and missioned on up. We were mainly on 70 degree polystyrene ice but with a number of mixed sections up to M3. We brought 5 screws and a stripped down rack with 4 cams and selection of nuts, and used all of it in 2x 40m pitches.