2.24.2012 - A Day in Pictures

Last Wednesday and Thursday were two of the gnarliest ski days I can remember in a long time. Thursday ended with a friend tomahawking at 50 mph through trees, rocks and stumps; followed by two pairs of broken bindings. After that, the idea of a nice mellow day of exploring around Kebler Pass sounded perfect. Here's the day in pictures:

Back to Wolfie

Crested Butte has received significant snow lately, but because the underlying snow is not particularly supportable or stable Nick and I decided to head down to Wolf Creek Pass on Thursday morning in search of a deeper and more stable snowpack. A couple weeks ago we had great luck down there, and as Wolf Creek Pass had just received 18 inches of new snow we hoped for a repeat.

The nice thing about wolf creek pass is that 1000+ vertical feet of skiing can be accessed with a quick 400 vertical foot skin. On Thursday morning, after just such an approach Nick and I were stoked to be on top of our first run of the day. But dropping into north facing trees we found some of the heaviest snow I've ever skied. It was literally like trying to ski 18 inches of cream cheese, neither of us had ever experienced snow like this in January.

So, we made a quick adjustment in our plans and decided to spend the rest of the day exploring farther out zones on our snowmobiles. 10 miles from the trailhead our luck went south when Nick's sled came to a sudden and unexpected halt.

After about an hour of troubleshooting and the help of a friendly local we came to the conclusion that we wouldn't be fixing this one on the trail.

Having never towed before we figured it would be best to have Nick steer his sled

 

Which may have made Nick...

a bit snowy.

But after all that we still had a hotel reservation in South Fork for Thursday night, so we figured we take advantage of Friday to do some more exploring and play on the remaining sled. 

We headed up to some play meadows that Jordan and I had found previously and were quickly reminded that sleds don't care if the snow is a bit heavy! Photo Nick Matisse.

Didn't quite pull this one out..

 

Nick doing a better job staying on the sled:

 

Photo Nick Matisse.

 

Nick and I even ripped up some tandem pow turns!!! Awesome!

 

Before we knew it it was time to head back to the trailhead. Another adventure in the books, not the best skiing ever, but definitely some memories I will never forget! 

Finally, I'd like to mention one enormous difference between the snowmobile and backcountry ski communities. When Nick's sled broke on Thursday, a more experienced local sledder spent three hours of his day helping us get Nick's sled back to the trailhead. In the backcountry ski world this intrusion into someone else's zone followed by some form of incident would have been met by jeers, scorn, and a decided unwillingness to help. I will always appreciate and value the kindness, friendliness and helpfulness of the snowmobile community and hope to bring it to the ski world.

4.16.2011: An interesting day: Berthoud and Jones Pass

For weeks now I have wanted to ski the Hidden Knob at Berthoud. The Hidden Knob represents the region directly east of the Hidden Knoll and is a small very steep, lightly treed east facing slope. Upon arrival at Berthoud we discovered significantly less new snow than we had seen at Loveland, which was clearly at least partly due to major consolidation due to the warm spring weather. Upon arriving at the Knob we found a very hard bed surface without about 9 inches of heavy storm snow on top of it. A preliminary ski cut across the top of the slope produced no results. Aware that the storm snow would probably go Matt then skied a diagonal line down releasing most of the storm snow below him. Grete followed and the storm snow released about 15 feet above her, on such a steep (55 degrees) and slippery bed it was virtually impossible for Grete to ski out the slide, but she did a great job fighting to quickly move diagonally and stop herself against a tree. After this we quickly lost our appetite for the area and moved on to sled tandem practice/skiing on Jones pass.

Matt Teuling

Every day on my sled I feel more comfortable although I still have a long ways to go. We are developing better tandem techniques that I am really excited about, I'm getting better at not getting stuck, and getting better at getting unstuck! Eventually I managed to get Fabio really really stuck and was absolutely failing at getting unstuck. Fortunately a really friendly group of slednecks showed up and quickly got my sled out. We then watched them hit a road gap jump they built for a while. One thing that I have noticed and really appreciated about sledders that they are WAY more friendly and helpful than skiers ever are. Skiers almost always have a snobby mentality that not only frowns on beginners, but really straight up hates on them. It is so awesome and inspiring to see a group of people who are willing to share knowledge and instantly willing to struggle with you to move your sled!

After watching the slednecks for a while we got a bit cocky, forgot how much of gapers we are and decided we could make it up the hill below. Needless to say we were wrong, somehow we managed to turn the sled around, not fall off completely, drag ourselves back on, and make it down the hill alive.

O boy today was a show!!!