Running of the Tarp

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Beginning around lunch, the first designated waiters being lining up outside the Bluegrass festival. They’ll sit, and wait, outside the gates of the venue, for the following eight hours of performances, then another eight hours until the sun comes up and local kids with Radio Flyer coffee carts wheel through. Soon, Festival workers pass out number cards indicating one’s place in line to discourage last-minute line-jumpers.

Around 9am, everyone gets up, carrying folded chairs and plastic tarps rolled with military precision, and begins filing into the venue. Festival workers keep the pace down to an amble, checking numbered cards at the entrance, but from there it’s a free-for-all sprint to stake out a patch of grass as close to the stage as the sprinter can get. Tarps get whipped out across the lawn as tarp runners stake claims for their entourages, who are likely still sleeping.

Following at solid three hours of sleep, Allison and I pedaled into town around 5am on Saturday morning and relieved Heather of her post, where she’d posted up in line overnight. We watched the sun rise and waited, with morning breath, for the coffee shop to open. Ed came and took Allison’s spot and the two of us dashed in and staked out just about the exact same place our group had claimed the day before.

It was too hot and sunny by 10am to think about falling back asleep in our shadeless tent, so we went for a bike ride before returning to another afternoon with the Festivarians.

Brown Snow Skiing

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Despite a layer of Utah-colored dirt covering the snow, Allison, Anna, Rohan, Kevin, Tyler and I went out for a couple ski tours near Leadville. Skiing down red-brown snow feels kind of how I imagine it might feel to go skiing on a shag-carpet covered mountainside: skis don’t slide especially well but then you cross a patch of clean, white snow and then they suddenly rocket forward. Its a constant battle to stay balanced as you get thrown forwards then backwards then forwards again. Even with weird snow, skiing’s still better than a day spent doing just about anything else.

Gooseberry Mesa

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Allison and I spent a couple days romping through Gooseberry mesa. The riding consists of lots of techy little ups and downs without any sustained uphill grunts nor fast downhills. The constant up-over-down riding has it’s own sort of flow and is pretty entertaining in an xc sort of way.

The Book of Revelations

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After two weeks of exploring and skiing in the Revelations we’re back to syphilization. Despite our pilot Rob’s estimate that the snowpack is less than 50% of normal this year, we found some really aesthetic lines to ski- long, continuous, and surrounded by vertical miles of granite. I have a pile of photos to sort through so look back for a trip report of some sort in the next couple weeks.

My first ski turns in AK were down the couloir that tops out in the notch to the right of the un-named peak. Since it was also the first descent of the trip we named the chute “alpha.”

Revelations, Alaska

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Noah Howell, Andrew McLean, Courtney Phillips and I are headed into the Revelation Mountains on Monday. Due to notoriously bad summer weather and also being a long bush flight from anyplace you and I have heard of, the range has gone relatively unexplored in the 40 years since David Roberts first tagged a few peaks in the area.

The plan is to fly into the Revelations where we’ll mostly base camp, perhaps moving a few times, for about two weeks.  Since the area is relatively unexplored it’s hard to plan for specific objectives so we’re packing an array of technical gear and hoping for weather that allows us to plan as we go.  When we’ve had enough we’ll, in theory, ski down the Revelation glacier, cross a few braids of the Big River, then ‘shwack to bush pilot Rob’s hunting camp before flying back to Anchorage.

Currently, my biggest concern is the quantity of TVP that Andrew packed.  I didn’t see a Beano ration on that list…

Andrew is bringing his SPOT and will send periodic “okay” messages tagged with the location from where the message was sent. Bookmark this page or check back here to follow along.

 

photocrati gallery

Return to Happyland

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This is Happyland.

Sixteen months ago the Mountain Animals spent a week here skiing fabulously deep snow.  When we skied these pillows last year someone started calling the zone “pillow fight” but I like “Happyland,” the name the TGR crew came up with earlier this winter, too.

Despite being light and fluffy, the snow in Interior BC sticks to near-vertical surfaces.  If this rack were here in Utah the topsheets would be bare.

But, this isnt Utah and so the snow defies gravity and makes the cliffbands look like they’re made from Stay Puft products.

Remember that feeling when you were ten and as you reach the last step on the top of the high-dive you notice how far above the pool you are?  And how suddenly the decision to climb up the ladder in the first place seems like it was a bad one?

The lines are technical and with so many horizon lines it’s hard to be sure you’re standing on top of what you’d been eyeing from below.   Convincing yourself you weren’t going to be swallowed by a deep snow moat or accidentally launch fifty feet to flat were mental hangups for all of us.

Then, after  a few minutes of wrestling with those “on top of the high-dive”  thoughts  there comes a time when you stop thinking and do it.

And it is glorious.

The skiing on our first day at the hut was marginal.  It hadn’t snowed for a week and long spring days had baked the surface.  But that night clouds rolled in and on Day 2 it dumped all day then all night.

Eat your heart out, Jordan Manley

Tag-teaming trees

The lady-friend gettin’ hers

Mini-golf sequence

…with a satified look-back out the bottom

Unfortunately, stability during and after the storm was marginal above treeline.  We could hear avalanches more often than we could see them and I just happened to be taking a photo of the fresh crown lines when this one came down.  When the clouds lifted we could see that this avalanche began at the top of the same couloir that the Deeper guys rode during their week here.

During forays onto the glaciers we kept our angles low, which isn’t hard to do around this hut.  In fact, low angle glacier skipping is what the hut’s known for.

Dramatic light in a valley a few miles from the hut

First tracks OB.  Swift. Noisy. Deep.

Then time for the daily dose

R.Strong down the stairs…

…And out onto the apron,  looking highly disappointed.

Seth dropped in for a beer…

…A beer that we’d smuggled from MT to BC on the drive north.  Never have I felt less likely to be searched than crossing the border in a BMW with three cute, athletic women.

Afternoon cocktails led to sunset meadowskipping above the hut

And whipped cream for breakfast is the new homeopathic for hangovers

We explored areas  further from the hut, but sadly blue sky had baked the left half of the gully.

And put in some good ol’ steep zig zags to counteract all the flat-heel uphilling we’d been doing.

Which got us to some north-facing goods, still un-manked by sun.

Though the spring sun was quick to crustify the snow, the views didn’t suck.

We pushed high onto the glaciers, hoping for a window of good light

And saw lots of spindrift avalanches on the way

And wrapped up the trip with another lap on Happyland

After which I signed one, skinned up and sent

And dedicated a page to the place in the chalet guest book

Mountain Animals

Dawn Patrolin’

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Ty, Ian and I met long before sunrise this morning, hoping to be the first to the top of Mt Superior for some powder skiing.  It doesn’t take many mornings out in Little Cottonwood to realize that there’s a whole posse of folks who ski the south face of Superior at sunup before heading into office.  It’s a testament to an early alarm clock wakeup and some good luck to actually see the face untracked below one’s ski tips in the early morning sunshine.

Ty, Ian and I had great powder turns down and were headed back down the canyon long before the ski lifts had started loading.

Neil and Ian Provo’s edit from Superior:

Doomed

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Foiled for the umpteenth time at skiing Timp, I settled instead for a tour through the sheep pen.  Pete and I hitched a ride from the mouth of Big Cottonwood to Alta and that alone has the potential to turn an average ski day into an adventure.  For the record Mom, my ratio of good experiences to bad while hitchhiking in Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons are about 25:1, maybe higher.  Our driver, an older gent, 2nd geared up LCC accumulating a long tail of cars, all with riders apparently anxious to be pounding laps on refrozen chunder at Alta and Snowbird.  He pulled behind Noah’s parked and empty truck to drop us off, just in case we needed further proof of our casual pace.

Gliding past a guide and client loaded with dangling snowshoes, crampons, ice axe, rope, and waterbottle swinging from carabiners my mood bouyed from good to great: how lucky we are to be skiers in a snowy and fair-weathered range!  On top of Mt Superior where there was nary a breath of wind and as soon as I put on a windbreaker over my t-shirt I was too hot.  Somehow, despite the balmy temps, the snow on north faces had stayed soft.  And where crusts had formed last night they’d now turned back into soft damp snow overlying cold dense powder.

Skier tracks on Sky Ramp:  big exposure and a double fall line

We continued to find cold and uncrusted snow, making our way from one north facing slope to the next.  By mid-afternoon we’d made a handful of laps though the empty sheep pen and coasted out the valley to Big Cottonwood Canyon road.    The one bad hitchhiking experience I’ve had involved riding in the metal bed of a 30-year-old pickup, struggling to keep from sliding into one another as we swung down the valley, passing cars two at a time over double yellows and NASCAR’ing though the s-curves before being finally delivered shaking but unharmed at the bottom.  So I was understandably leery when the driver of a pickup was the first to offer a ride.  After he vowed to drive in a safe and sane manner we jumped in back, knowing Pete was counting the minutes til he was expected at work.  Pete suggested printing up business card-sized invitations to a BBQ that one could give to every driver who gives a lift during the year and I think that’s a great idea.  Pete, lets host it at your house.

Pfeifferhorn Northwest Couloir

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Before we skied down Hypodermic Needle a few days ago, the clouds broke just enough to allow a beautiful view of Pfeiff’s NW couloir.  The route follows a rock slab ramp for a few hundred feet before making a neat turn into a rocky funnel above a long apron that fans out 1300′ below the rocky peak.  The upper ramp is visible only in profile, if at all, from low in Little Cottonwood and Thunder Ridge is really the only place from which one can observe the entire line.

Noah Howell and I snacked on the summit and had a quick pow-wow to discuss how to best manage the pocket of newly drifted snow just a few feet below the entrance to the line.  It seemed unlikely that the drift would be react to our weight – we’d both been out skiing the past couple days and hadn’t found sensitive wind drifts – but at the same time if the drift did avalanche there’s a chance that one could be carried over the cliffs below.  In deference to Murphy’s Law, I built a quick anchor and belayed Noah as he stomped the pillow then jump turned down snow that was alternately crusted and chalky.

After ten years of exclusively telemark skiing Noah now owns an AT setup and that change chas elicited an outpouring of OMG’s! posted to his Facebook profile.  With a level of “I’ll figure it out as I go” nonchalance that makes me jealously shake my head, it seems that his first few heel-locked outings have all involved some sort of ropework above an objective hazard.  Dude’s got skills.

A previous party had left a mystery anchor – webbing coming from somewhere under snow – so that one could be roped the final bit before reaching the bolts.  I gave the webbing a few good yanks and decided to rappel but avoid weighting the unknown system.  The snow around the bolts had sluffed revealing water ice beneath and so it was a welcome mental crutch to have a rope running though my hand while I downclimbed. Here, Noah “No Place Like Home” Howell hops down to the buried mystery anchor.

As Noah downclimbed I noticed that the bolts had been engraved and I really got a kick out of the subtlely placed wit, all the more meaningful because I was perched above a rocky drop with not more than two inches of my boot toes edged into the ice I’d been doggedly kicking at.

Ski to Die / Happy Rappy

The rappel down was straightforward and, with ropes coiled, we hop-sideslip-hopped down crusty snow down the lower half of the route until the aspect shifted just enough that the snow turned from shiny, irregularly breakable crust to dense but soft powder.  The snow down the valley was getting damp on this warm day but the exit was quick and painless, which is about all I’ve learned to ask for from skiing out Hogum.

Here’s more photos from the tour:

Hypodermic Needle

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Ty, Ian and I skied the Hypodermic Needle couloir, which is regarded as a local classic due to it’s steep pitch, narrow rock-lined walls and it’s 2000 foot vertical drop.  I’ve approached the Coalpit headwall by a number of routes, all of them slogs, and I think the route we took this time – White Pine lot to the Obelisque, down to the base of the Needle, then up the last big push – was the most enjoyable.  Here’s photos: