Hope you all had a good weekend! Tooled around with the new guitar and learned a Hanson Brothers song (Can't hide the Heino!). Then me and Smrp dug out of the windblown snow at home on Saturday, then headed out back with the dynamic duo (Monkey and Basie, below) and realized (again) why I hate the wind here.
All that awesome snowfall just gets scoured off to Kansas. (Or piles up in front of the deck where Ms. Guppie has to stand up to look over it - see below).
Then today I had plans with some pilots to go ski but they all bailed so I headed to Windy Hill anyway on the Jak BCs instead of the Combats. Holy crap, it felt like two boat anchors were attached to my feet! The Combats and 3-pins are literally half the weight of my "usual" backcountry setup.
Up the gully and hill first, I took a nice run down some soft snow...but with 18" in the last few days it was much less deep than I thought it'd be (yes, the wind's fault once again).
I take a similar pic of this slope every time I come here...but I just love the wind whipping the snow off the distant peak, and the open trees are such an inviting scene. It wasn't even windy at this spot, but I knew what was coming...
My lunch spot (hiding from the wind behind some krumholtz). Since I didn't have anyone to piss off that I was getting us lost (again), I finally recon'd some terrain that I've wanted to check for ski spots for awhile now. I found one, and this is the top of it. The wind to get over here was horrendous though (see below sastrugi). It was the warmest day of the winter (34 deg at 11,000ft) but with the 40-50mph wind whipping broken apart snow granuals at your face...it felt like i was going to have frost bite by the time I got out of here.
This is hard skiing. Those sastrugi chunnels are over a foot deep!
Then, relief. I followed some others' tracks from the windblown top to tree-run heaven below. I found this open alley after some effort, which busted out into another alley, intermixed with tighter trees. All that new snow was protected from the snow here and all you had to deal with was occasional tight trees. All in all, it dropped over 1,000 vertical - which is a ton for a tree run in the Front Range! Another semi-secret spot "discovered." Pilots...you missed out!!
All that awesome snowfall just gets scoured off to Kansas. (Or piles up in front of the deck where Ms. Guppie has to stand up to look over it - see below).
Then today I had plans with some pilots to go ski but they all bailed so I headed to Windy Hill anyway on the Jak BCs instead of the Combats. Holy crap, it felt like two boat anchors were attached to my feet! The Combats and 3-pins are literally half the weight of my "usual" backcountry setup.
Up the gully and hill first, I took a nice run down some soft snow...but with 18" in the last few days it was much less deep than I thought it'd be (yes, the wind's fault once again).
I take a similar pic of this slope every time I come here...but I just love the wind whipping the snow off the distant peak, and the open trees are such an inviting scene. It wasn't even windy at this spot, but I knew what was coming...
My lunch spot (hiding from the wind behind some krumholtz). Since I didn't have anyone to piss off that I was getting us lost (again), I finally recon'd some terrain that I've wanted to check for ski spots for awhile now. I found one, and this is the top of it. The wind to get over here was horrendous though (see below sastrugi). It was the warmest day of the winter (34 deg at 11,000ft) but with the 40-50mph wind whipping broken apart snow granuals at your face...it felt like i was going to have frost bite by the time I got out of here.
This is hard skiing. Those sastrugi chunnels are over a foot deep!
Then, relief. I followed some others' tracks from the windblown top to tree-run heaven below. I found this open alley after some effort, which busted out into another alley, intermixed with tighter trees. All that new snow was protected from the snow here and all you had to deal with was occasional tight trees. All in all, it dropped over 1,000 vertical - which is a ton for a tree run in the Front Range! Another semi-secret spot "discovered." Pilots...you missed out!!
1 comment:
awesome story and photos!
timmay!
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