Teton Pass Backcountry Tour, Thursday March 24th.

Teton Pass in the middle, Glory Mtn and bowl on the right side.

Start of the hour hike up to the top. Let's focus in on the details...

mortar shells (huge!) with the names of those that have died in avalanches on the pass.

This is a highly used pass so conflict seems to be an issue here sadly.

If you find one...don't pick it up...? DUH?!

On up...straight up! Bootpacks follow the fall-line. See the road back there?

Me down the gullet of Glory Bowl.  This is an awesome LONG descent!

Teton Pass has more terrain to explore than I'll ever know.  There are the obvious slopes that you can see from the parking lot, or read about in the online "guidebooks", but I can tell from just looking at the characteristics of the ecosystem that open glades permeate this entire area.  Under an hour bootpack from the car, you can get a better and longer ski run in that you can find anywhere in the front range...and it won't be tracked up after 10 people hit it either.  This is one of the many reasons why Jackson is a ski bum's destination, people move here to ski-to-live, and it's immediately obvious why.  I have yet to experience such a steep, deep, and expansive area in Colorado.  Silverton and the San Juan's perhaps, maybe Tahoe, but in Jackson the snow's lighter than Tahoe and safer than Silverton...it splits the difference in those area's snowpacks and comes out on top in my book.

Hayride down lower...we were really lucky with the snow conditions.

Glory Bowl is a classic descent.  It's obvious where to go, and it's over 1200 vertical feet of open bowl and sparse trees with some hucks thrown in.

After Glory, we switched sides of the pass and headed to where our noses took us.  We ended up on Xmas Bowl (we think) on the lookers left of Edelweiss Mtn, and something else I don't know the name of.  There were lots of tracks, apparently everyone has a night job here or doesn't work.  Doesn't matter, even a day after the big storm, there were untracked lines everywhere.

Hayride skinning (yes...SKINNING!) up to an unknown name Bowl on the right. Nobody here on a Thursday!

The bootpacking took some getting used to (I'm still sore in weird places from it almost a week later), and I'm not sure why skinning isn't the preferred mode of uphill travel here, but I guess when in Rome...

Me taking a picture of Hayride taking a picture of our turns down Xmas Bowl.