I met Dave H. and Rich in town early and we were the first group to leave the parking lot up high at 7:30am. We were headed north to explore a new zone around Wolf Peak. There was supposedly a cabin somewhere up there too.

From the parking lot, we gained Cornice Ridge, then Buzz's ridge, then followed it around until we hit the high spot that I'd split skied from yesterday. We descended north from here through a nice chute with some decent snow, then toured straight north along a ridge that tees into a bowl above Waldie Lake. Google Earth and the topo maps suggested this might have a few entry points. We pretty much stumbled on a very promising one as soon as we gained the top. Dave took a few cautious steps down into the bowl and dug a pit. CTE(2) down 30 sudden planar followed by a few pretty clean CTM's down 60 and 80 or so fueled the retreat. It was a short shot, but had exposure on the fall line. We poked around a bit more and found a protected entrance via some trees. Nothing ended up moving and we enjoyed playing on the natural gullies down to the bottom of the bowl.

We toured north following the creek to Waldie Lake. There's no flat terrain beside the east and west edges of the lake as the mountain meets the lake, so any cabin would have to be at the north end - a half mile walk. We headed across the lake and soon found no cabin. Looking at the maps, we think it's closer to the end of the logging road, which is another mile and about 500 feet lower than the north end of the lake. Since we weren't planning on spending the night, the search for the cabin was abandoned and we stopped for lunch. This area offered up lines everywhere we looked - several big chutes and one large un-kootenay looking rock feature that would be more at home in Roger's Pass.

We headed east up to the smaller un-named lake under Wolf Peak and set our sites on the summit of Wolf. Yet more lines revealed themselves and we soon were nearing the summit. Once gaining the final ridge we saw that the summit is split into two pieces by a small channel. We opted for the northern summit and after picking our way through a few rocky bits descended down the north face and wrapped around to the east towards Pristine Pass. From there we toured up to the high point on the ridge between Pristine Pass and Windy Ridge. Several very appealing lines were encountered on the north face of this ridge, but we were running short on daylight. We dropped south towards the power lines and enjoyed some wide open old growth trees. Soon we ran out of usable down hill and switched to ski mode sans skins. Under the buzzing power lines and then out via someone's up track. 10 minutes of poling and we were at the Creston side parking lot. Thumbs illuminated by headlamp and the three of us were quickly given a ride back to the vehicle on the top of the pass. Total up today was 5,310 feet, we covered 11.3 miles, and found so many new things to go back and bag on another day.