The scenario appears to be at dawn Monday snow began to fall. For some reason he may have not chose to escape and instead hunkered down. One needs to be storm skier to understand how unpleasant ridgelines can be during storm. What makes Taboose so uniquely bad is the pass is not abrupt but rather gradual miles long. Thus even during early morning Monday it could have been blowing pretty hard and difficult to see more than a few hundred feet. Just think of how bad visibility is atop Emigrant Chair at Squaw or Cornice at Kirkwood during even minor storms. Since I suspect his clothing was inadequate, he may have turned around simply because it was so cold, getting colder, and he could not see where he was going. And it may have been his feet got wet and began to freeze which is really scary.maverick wrote:As time passes I wonder now out loud whether he may have gone down
the Muro Blanco since Taboose and Pinchot would have been out of the question
with the winds forecasted to be at 40 mph and a windchill of -8 or lower at higher
elevations on Tue (know because I was thinking of go up). Going down to lower
elevation towards Paradise in the banks of the Kings River could be done this year
with the lower water levels and dry summer we had, but how much snow was
there already on the ground from the previous weeks storm...
So yeah down into the canyon. If his feet were damaged by the cold, even after the sun came out, going back up over Taboose through a foot or two of fresh new snow may have been quickly painful. So yeah down MB which is not a place I have visited but have read it is rather treeless but brushy in places. Gets that way because as the topo shows it is has steep smooth glaciated canyon walls that propogate avalanches though the latter would likely not be an issue a couple days later. However he'd need to get way down to below 6k to leave the snow and that is a long ways with inadequate footwear. So yeah could be hunkered down in MB with foot issues but I would expect the helicopters have already surveyed that and not seen tracks nor seen any sign of fires which is a bad sign. Hang in there partner!