Like i said in my last post there has been some MONSTER AVALANCHES! With all these historic avalanches and 9 deaths in 2 weeks i have not been to motivated to go ski in the back country. So with it still a little scary out there but a beautiful day Henry and i decided to break out the rock tools. We met at the Frisco exit with no plan or expectations for the day. We bush waked alongside i-70 then post holed up to the west side of the wall. With both of us not climbing for 5 months the butter fly's where starting up! We played rock, paper, scissors, to see who would lead first and Henry won. He took off and was back in about 20 mins with a smile ear to ear. My turn we pulled the rope and i led up. I got half way up and deiced why not get Henry up here and we do a little multi-pitch. He was pumped on the idea and up he came. We each climbed the upper section then repelled down and out. AWESOME DAY!!!! |
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We are staring to get a lot of snow and having some historical avalanches here in the county. When i have gone out lately i have seen some scary results in my snow pits. The deep slabs are not to be messed with YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE ONE! With this in mind Henry and i set out to ski in the trees on gold hill. Super easy skin up mayflower gulch then there is normally always a skin track up into some fun glade skiing! It was a beautiful day to go relax and play on the mellow stuff! GREAT TO HAVE LITTLE RUSTY OUT THERE WITH US TOO!!!
After busting my ass to get up peak 4 yesterday i decided i should make the most out of the skin track before it fills in or melts away. So i took off this morning with my eyes set on skiing the trees again or skiing gasoline alley! i was all by myself and had training at 12 so i had to hurry and not make any bad calls. I made it up to tree line in 84 mins and dug a pit. I found that the deep slab problem was 130 cm deep.This meant i had to be careful because i could trigger that leak layer if i found a shallow spot in the snow pack. I new that if i could get into the alley by hugging the treeline and not set anything off then the ally would flatten out and be safe. I made it in there and had some awesome turns on a mellow 28 degree pitch! I got back to training and told henry about it! He was super jealous so he said we would have to go do it again, i said i have no problem with that! The next day we went up and skied it again it was great!
Like i said before "i love this place", such a cool, fun, easy place to explore. I picked my buddy Shneeb up, went to taco bell, and then headed to meadow creek trail head. Shneeb had just gotten back from Australia yesterday so we where not trying to set the speed record up Little Chief. Finally after a little while we got up top and once again the views from here are so cool! We started skiing right off the top, skiing the top 300 yards of the north facing glades. The snow was deep and solid so we decided to go look into the chutes. GOOD THING WE DID IT WAS EPIC!!!! Knee deep pow all the way down with fun cliffs and pillow lines to be had!
Here is a link to the AWESOME days i had skiing Humming Bird Gully, Dirty Books Couloir, Coin slot, and Mt Victoria!
After an awesome solo session yesterday i wanted to get out for more exploring! I wanted to go to some place new so i looked online where in the county was skiing good. I found little chief! I waited for my friend Henry to get out of race training and we meet up at 3 pm. This is one of the easiest skins you can find. You end up going up the meadow creek trail, take a left off it before entering wilderness area, do a few zig zags, find the old lodging road and take that almost all the way to the top! It took us just under 2 hours to get to the top. We watched the sun set, took some pictures, and geared up. We skied the cold smoke in the north facing trees and got back to the trail head just around dark. With it being dark we were not able to get any pictures but this is a awesome little area so i know i will be visiting it again! After getting a concussion in Big Ski Montana i had to lay low for a few weeks and not race. With that being said today was my first day back out on snow and i had a nice little line i wanted to play on. I got my back country stuff and some food and water and head to the base of copper mtn resort. Now there back country / side country gates are nothing special. The only good thing they access is Janet's cabin. If you ride the lift and use the gate you save about 4 miles of your hike one way. So with that i headed out the gate and was planning on going up towards the cabin and play around in the trees. I ended up finding a banana shaped glade area. From now on i am going to call it banana glades because of its shape! I did 5 laps in the glades and then skied all the way out to i-70. From there you ski the bike path down to copper and home i was.
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AuthorConor McDonald Archives
May 2015
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