A Tale of Two Backcountry Trips

I haven't posted in a while, because the weather has been way too nice to waste it sitting inside staring at a computer screen. I would like to talk about a pair of ski trips I took over the last few months, just to highlight the variety of trips that people talk about when they say that they are "skiing the backcountry".

First, there was a trip in Early March up in the ADKs that can only be described as a slog. Here're some pics:

I'll try to stay out of the location disclosure/nondisclosure kerfuffle that was raging earlier this year, and I'll just post this picture that tells everybody exactly where we were:

And since I'm not saying the location in writing, there's absolutely no chance someone will try to google this mountain, along with the term "backcountry skiing", and gain all of the important knowledge that I am about to impart. Haha, secrecy and jingoism win again over knowledge and information!

Anyway, the reason the trip was a slog was that it took forever just to get to the base of the slides. It was 5.8 miles of up, down and flat skiing with skins on our feet, and it was not ideal. In retrospect, I should have used an XCD ski with some fischscaled bases that would have enabled me to kick and glide over the flat parts, ski the downhill parts, and hold my own on the ups. But, since I didn't have that ski, I just had to use my NTN setup with skins.The way in, although annoying, was pretty beautiful:

We reached a lean-to about 5 miles in. A better plan would have had us staying here the previous night, but I'm not big on winter camping. Someone else seemed to have used the shelter recently, though, because there were signs of fire (and a relatively fresh skin track):

(Photo by Mitch)

After a hellish 0.75 more miles, we reached the slides, the low clouds started to lift, and we started to get some views:

(Photo by Mitch)

The slides are named as fingers on hand would be (pinky, middle, index, ring), and you use the "wrist" slide to access. I'm pretty sure we skied the index slide, but I still have to buy my updated ADK Slide Guide to know for sure. Here's a couple of pictures from the descent:

(Video Capture by Mitch)

The snow was good. Tiny little crust with about 5 or 6 inches of pow underneath. After skiing, it was just a quick 5.8 mile jaunt back to the car:

It was an awesome trip. We were the only people on the mountain (the only people for miles, actually), the conditions were wintry, and it was a ridiculously long day - probably about 12 miles of hiking when all was said and done, which was a pretty epic day as far as my winter adventures go.

It was about as far as you possibly could have gotten from two weekends ago at Mount Washington:

It seemed like everyone in the east coast skiing community was there that weekend, so you can read their reports. I'll just give you a couple of pictures to show how different it was from the earlier adventure:

We arrived on Saturday around 9:30 am, and we were forced to park a quarter mile down the street from Pinkham Notch. We walked in from there with full packs (I was carrying 24 beers for consumption that night at the shelters):

The hike in was fine, if crowded. Before we even walked a mile, we were able to put our skins on:

Up to Hojos, which was a mob scene. We met dogs (this one was named Steve):

And picked out some lines:

Then we hiked in to the ravine:

And went up:

Paused at the top for a second to check out the steepness:

(Instagram by Mitch)

Then we did some skiing:

Definitely a good day. We didn't want to leave the ravine:

(Beers came in handy)

We stayed in the shelters that night. The party was good, but the camping was kind of chilly - and I stupidly left my sleeping pad at the bottom because I didn't feel like I had room in my pack (what with all the beer). Sleeping bag on top of Lean-to floor was not the most comfortable arrangement.

Didn't stop us from getting up early the next morning to check out Hillman's Highway:

 

Hang out at the top of the climb:

And ski down the Highway:

After navigating the Sherburne trail, we hiked back out, and went to a bar for some well deserved hot food.

The point to all of this is that there's more that one way to ski backcountry. Whether you're skiing alone deep in the woods, skiing a well traveled BC "proving ground", or just skinning a closed ski area (Big Tupper Video coming soon - I promise), there are lots of ways to put that shiny new AT gear you bought to use. You can camp, or just do day trips. You can be by yourself, or with the entire skiing population of the east. Just go out and do it.

There will probably be one more skiing report this year - I'm thinking either Killington or Tuckerman again by way of the Auto Road. After that, we're on to summer. I've already had the mountain bike out a couple of times this year, and the trails are in pristine shape. Loving this time of year.

Telluride, CO - 3/18/13

Yesterday, I did nothing. I sat on my couch and watched movies. I didn't do laundry, I didn't do dishes, I just sat on my lazy ass and ate leftover pizza in front of a glowing rectangle. It was the first day I've been able to do that since November, and it was fantastic. But, since I was a lazy sack yesterday, I feel like I have to actually do something today, my day off from my real job. Since nobody was in for Backcountry Monday (too bad, too . . . probably the last chance of the season around here), I put in some laundry and decided to finish up my report on the whirlwind SW Colorado trip.

We left Silverton right after skiing. We had wanted to stop in town and have a drink, maybe sample the distillery, but we wanted to get to Telluride at a reasonable time. It's only 11.5 miles to Telluride from Silverton as the crow flies, but the drive is 73 miles and takes two hours in good weather. It's important to have good weather because the road has 500-3,000 foot drops off the side and not a lot of guard rails to speak of:

We reached the town of Ouray, which is a more frustrating 9 miles away from Telluride, but still an hour drive. There is, apparently, a backcountry hut system that would be really fun to try if/when I get back to the area.

There was a little bit more sweaty palm driving:

And a cool waterfall that actually had a guard rail over top:

And after that, we left the mountains and drove into the high desert again. Strange.

I see no reason to stay in Ridgeway. It seemed like a sad, depressed town, pretty rednecky, pretty flat, and just barely not close enough to skiing. The town was 1 hour from Telluride, but it might as well have been a different planet. I looked at hotels here when I was researching places to stay. They have amazing deals on Telluride lift tickets if you stay in Ridgway or Ouray, but the drive and the ambiance of Telluride make the extra money worth it. We pressed on:

We got a room, walking distance to the lifts, at the Mountainside Inn for $99 - pretty good by Telluride Standards. After dinner in town, we went back to the room and crashed. We said we wanted to do at least one car bomb in honor of St. Patrick's day, but after hiking and skiing all day, we were pretty beat. What was the point?

The next morning, we had more energy:

Telluride is a really cool town. Stuck in a box canyon, only one road in during the winter, and tons of old miner town kitsch. Which is a completely crazy juxtaposition with the art galleries, high end ski stores, and insanely rich people who seem to love the place. There's a free Gondola that comes up right from town and allows access to the mountain and Mountain Village - the newly constructed "town" that has multimillion dollar homes lining the slopes (sort of like Deer Valley). Telluride proper seems to have more "soul" - Mountain Village is like one of those Stratton-type, thoroughly planned, generic ski village-in-a-box sort of things. Although, to be fair, Telluride itself is a pretty ritzy place. If you don't like the sight of rich people loading their Porsche SUVs with brand new, seemingly unused ski gear at the end of the day, go to Monarch or something. I don't care about that as long as the skiing is awesome.

On this day, the skiing was pretty good. We tried to stay in the shadows as best we could. As at Silverton the previous day, the stuff out of the sun didn't have the really-hard-icy-death-crust, and was definitely skiable:

It would have been a great day to rip groomers, but I hadn't really come to Colorado for that. After a few runs of alternating good and horrible conditions in the trees, we got a little antsy. We asked a ski patroller where we could find some good snow and he pointed us up towards Palmyra Peak.

We hiked up from the lift in the lower right corner of that map, and we skied the "Mountain Quail" line. It definitely looks bigger in real life:

Zoom in and see the size of the people. The snow was a million times better up there:

But we still stuck to the shadows:

Until we opened it up a little at the bottom:

We even found some fun little rocks to play on on the lower part of the run. Best snow on the mountain that day, for sure, and it was cool to have to earn it a little bit. Here's a little Instagram collage I put together of my brother's run:

After that, it was time for lunch. Here's my brother feasting on a burger down in Mountain Village:

We skied lazily in the afternoon, touring around, ripping groomers, occasionally venturing into the bumps (which had just barely started to soften up), and just generally having a good time:

That last trail was called "See Forever" - pretty good name. Around 3:00, we went to one of the on mountain lodges for some relaxation. There's definitely a lot of options for this sort of thing at Telluride. We passed an on mountain wine bar, a few restaurants that ranged from cafeteria to classy, and this place, Gorrano Ranch:

Not a bad view of the band shell, the "beach" volleyball setup, and the surrounding mountains. We got our beers from a bar in what looked and smelled (old wood and dirt) like an old outbuilding from a gold mine. It was probably just a tenderly reconstructed replica, but it was really cool. 

Overall, we were pretty psyched on Telluride. If I won the lottery, this would be a pretty phenomenal place to live. The houses are spectacularly out of my price range, the condos are mildly out of my price range, and there's not a lot of "real" jobs in the area. It is impressive the way people out there make it work for themselves. We rode the lift with a guy from Green Bay, Wisconsin who has 4 weeks of a time share (two in the summer, two in the winter), and can't get enough of the place. We also rode the Gondola with a girl who commutes to her job as a court clerk from an hour away. I suppose that when your town is in the middle of nowhere, you're always going to hear stories about people coming from great distances for a taste of awesome. I guess everybody just needs more awesome in their lives.

Anyway, there's a bike path on one side of town, and a XC skiing/MTB/walking path on the other side of town, right next to the river. Since we left the Ranch too late and the trails were closed, we had to take the Gondy down into town and take that river trail back to the hotel. No problem:

It was, again, one of the best days of skiing in my life. So fun to be in such a cool place ripping really sweet lines. And I'm psyched that my brother was there, too. Hope he had as good of a time as I did. 

That was about it for the Colorado Trip. We skied Durango Mountain Resort the next day, but there really wasn't too much to report about it. It was rock hard, the snow never really softened up, and the mountain was kind of a pain to get around on. It was a big letdown after the two phenomenal days we had in Silverton and Telluride. And we locked the keys in the Jeep. We did a couple of park laps in the afternoon, and at least we got a good picture out of it:

No, it wasn't photoshopped:

Okay, that's it for now. Video, and more posts coming soon.