A day in the life of a foot model

I received a random email request from a friend of the Pilot to meet up with a Skiing magazine intern and film me getting in and out of my Dynafit bindings. After meeting at the coffee shop we quickly headed up high to film the technique. They definitely are funky bindings but they are mechanically ingenious. They just take a few days to get used to. After literally 10 minutes of filming, my foot-modeling career was over. So look for my ugly gray spray-painted Scarpa F3's getting in and out of Dynafit bindings on a website near you.

After the "shoot", I was left on my own to head higher and see what was going on with the snowpack in an area I've not explored before. The photo above shows the gist of it. I topped out at the knob on the left side of the picture after hiking with my skis on my back for a bit. Then I skied down into a sharp west-facing saddle that had absolutely no snow facing the divide and huge winddrifts on the leeward side. The saddle is out of the picture to the left, between the two main hills in this area - neither of which had much snow on them but had gale force winds that nearly knocked me down. (I think this is why I have not come here before.) But it's really close to town so I really wanted to see it's Dawn Patrol potential. The run I took was extremely low angle and short and not worth repeating. In the future when there's more snow, I need to check out the area on the right side of the photo below treeline.

There is so little snow that i was skinning and skiing on rocks (and hiking on scree) a lot today. Lots of whoomphing too, but less than last Monday. The thing about right now is that there are crappy turns, if you can even find any. It's a risk too since the coverage is so low. It's windslab, breakable crust, and recycled powder that goes to the ground where lots of goodies are hidden to wreck your ski bases or knees if you happen to drop one.

The wind right here was insane. I don't know why anyone in their right mind would purposely build a cabin here. Might as well live in a wind tunnel. It looks really old, but this cabin was actually built only 2 years ago! To no surprise by anyone but the owner, it blew down last winter. No wolves or piggies were involved in the incident.

I'm glad the Skiing mag intern opted out of the tour. I warned him that I 'tend to get lost' and quietly mumbled that there may be a mix of scree-hiking and post-holing involved. He said that he had to get back to Boulder to meet up with friends to go camping. Good thing. This was a classic Meriwether tour reminiscent of last year's Windy Ridge Traverse but this time I didn't torture anybody but myself (it was actually kinda fun).