The fun of the tour

A tour with two Pilots. This is a great picture because it shows nearly two generations of Pilots skinning up the trail, arriving first at the trail head this fine day. I put a short slideshow movie together with all the Mr. Pilot pictures I could find for his birthday gathering last night. The old IGSSC's were just classics - the Salad Days of singlespeeds in these parts. They weren't that long ago - 10 years - but long enough that they seem like a different time period - a different era. But seeing us still as friends and now exploring on skis together just warms the heart. Awww. Ok, enough of that sappy banter....on to skiing!

This area always trips me out: look at the trees - we don't have many places in the Front Range that have this much 'grandfather' lichen (that's my name, not theirs) and this much moisture. This place is truly a gem for many reasons.

So there we are, a plan to "just tour around" and see if we can find anything fun to ski down. I was in the upper more western cirque the day before, and now we were going to go knock out the next one with an idea I had while skiing down the previous day's route. I saw a skin track going up as I was going down. It veered right where I veered left. Now, it's not always a good idea to follow someone else's skin track (they could be a perpetually lost individual like me after all!) but I just had a feeling about this track - they just seemed to know where they were going.

After about a half hour we questioned that thought. On a more stable day, there were some pretty significant turns to be had above our skin track on the SE slope of 11837 - quite dramatic ones at that! But not today. So we benched around to the cirque sans turns and had our first obligatory hike of the day (above pic - Pilot below with skis on shoulder). Our contoured path basically cliffed out and we thought we'd have to turn around and ski down and around the cliffband, but the Pilot claimed that it was an easy downclimb so we shouldered the skis down a 20 foot rock wall and hiked out across some scree to a spot for lunch in the sun. None of us had ever been in this lake valley, cirque, or whatever it's called, and the blue skies against the white snow-covered cliffs..well, truly inspiring. This will deserve a trip back in the spring when those chutes can be skied safely.

Pilot resisting the magnetic attraction of what lies above.
Yes, it was that windy...it's the east side of the Divide!

This is a place where the parking lot is full on most days, but you never (OK, hardly ever) see a soul on the tour. A pretty stark contrast to our tour at Berthoud today (post to come tomorrow). The conditions were tough to ski up or down. Punchy in the trees and the South and East slopes had a baked suncrust with a melt-freeze layer on top so hard to get skins to stick. The north aspects were better, but were not much better than the other aspects except in the trees. So that's where we headed...into the woods for the return home. The downhill from the lake was a bit like Donkey Kong - a stair-steppy obstacle course. Steep dense trees with lots of rock outcrops and snow-covered logs, opening up every so often to open shelfy glades (like you see below) where you could get several awesome turns in before getting funneled into another set of dense trees that flattened out before it dropped off again.

One of the several short shots of turns we got this day.

Papa Pilot making it look easy

Check out the clouds above the Pilots in this picture

After all was said and done, we skied a bit over 5 miles from the trail head, around the cirque, and back. All below treeline today, so to not get blown to Kansas. We never seem to go farther than 6 miles on my tours, not sure why, but 1 mph is pretty standard. This will HAVE to change if I plan on finishing the Elk Mountains Grand Traverse in March with the Redneck!! Baby steps...baby steps. For now, I will just enjoy the fun of the tour.