Gooney Riders

Windy Colorado

cold front blew in on us- looks like more snow this week :)

looking good up there finally,

Chris

Pedaling Deep Pow and Skiing Wind Slab.

Bit slow pedaling on Friday.  My normal shortcut through Avery brewing, across the marsh, and over the railroad tracks turned into a trudge through shin deep snow.

Boulder just looks better with a nice frosting...

Headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park on Saturday to check out the new snow.

The snow had already slabbed up from the 50 mph winds. The weekend just came a day too late.  

 Some debris from couloir indicated a recent flushing.  Jason did a little snow science, and I built a little ramp off the windlip in which Isaac did his best Aspen Extreme...

Once again the Park beat us down with blustery conditions and Wind slab.  If only we had that good powder I was pedaling through on Friday morning!  The skiing was difficult, but the pictures look sweet with atmosphere of the blowing snow-

cheers,

Chris

Powder Thief

On Thursday, a huge snow storm hit Boulder.  They closed CU as well as the rest of the city.  I, being at home, kept working all day.  So when PhD and Corey were going skiing on Friday, I figured that since I'd worked on a day where technically I didn't have to...I could play hooky and go ski.  

I love how easy it is to rationalize going skiing.

We decided to go to the Secret Run via the Super Secret Entrance.  We discovered that apparently neither is terribly secret as we pile drove the CR-V into the snowbank behind Dude taking off up the trail solo.  He looked at us and shook his head.

We followed his tracks shortly after, obviously heading for the same bowl.

We got him in our sights at the bottom of the bowl.  He was halfway up.  So, being a nice person, I figured I'd catch up and help him break trail to the top.  When I catch him with still several hundred feet of vertical left, instead of accepting help, he turns off the trail, rips his skins off, and skis down.  

It wasn't like I was going to snake his line after he broke trail for us for the first 1.5 hours. So I kept hiking up, breaking trail for the boys who apparently figured that if they put me in front like a Roman slave girl, they wouldn't have to break trail at all.  They were right.

Eventually, after two beers, five cookies, and  a PB&J sandwich we skied down, only to find that dude had skinned up to within earshot of us, taken his skins off and skied back down.  

So we skied past him, decided that the snow was on average sub-par and not worth the effort of another lap, and headed home, leaving Dude to track the slope up all by himself.  

Then we had to dig the car out as PhD tried to pull it out with the E-brake still on. Sweet.

Pretty much famous

After an amazing amount of poking, prodding, and nagging, I finally got Chris to send some pictures into Backcountry magazine to see if they'd publish any.  While they don't accept submissions for print until June, they did put one of Chris pictures on their main webpage. 

Backcountry Magazine site here.

You've got to wait for the pictures to scroll through, I'm fairly sure the order is random. 

Just to think, our very own East Portal Windy Tunnel made it to the big time.  Sort of.   :)

Snow Couriers

We should really be out skiing today but...

soggy bike couriers- Nan-

Jason-

It snowed about a foot by noon.  Banks shut, city shut, and we eventually shut.  Good job to whoever makes it out skiing today or tomorrow, I am sure it was good.  Sometimes you can't help but smile trying to keep your bike upright in sloppy, wet snow.

Have you been by to see Casey Middle school trying to save face?

should be a sloppy day pedaling tomorrow, so better have a beer....

cheers,

Chris

Return to Hath

There was a lot of apprehension leading up to this hut trip.  A three-day, two-hut trip put together by Red to scope out the last third of the Elk Mountain Grand Traverse.  The second hut, Goodwin-Greene, had baggage.  A notoriously hard hut to find, the Christmas Hut Trip Crew had spent two nights out in the blizzard trying to find the thing, returning with no hut and several dozen frostbitten toes and fingers among them.  Jason has a good account of their adventures here.

So when NOAA was predicting another winter storm on the day we were planning on skinning from the Barnard hut to Goodwin-Greene, stress, apprehension, and fear ran high.  Armed with two GPS's, we were still more than ready to be able to make the call to turn back after the first night if things looked bad.  So we boarded the gondola at Aspen to gain the first 3000 feet of the journey and set off on the first 8 mile skin.

We did not belong in Aspen and it was good to finally get on the trail, even if it was a torn up disaster from far too many snowmachines.  Aside from the general frustration and fatigue that accompanies a long skin, the trip in was fairly uneventful and PhD, Chris and I were able to muster the energy for a run down the backyard ski slope.  The wind, preceding the storm kept us from more and we retired to the hut.

We woke up to snow. Not a blizzard, not a complete whiteout, but far from ideal conditions for traversing the two by two mile stretch of snow wasteland which was very reminiscent of Planet Hath from StarWars.  The GPS's were still picking up signals, Red had been to the hut before, we decided to march under UN Security Council Rules, one person wants to turn back, we all turn back.

It was fairly creepy.  The wind intensified as we gained the plateau and visibility was a hundred feet at best.  The name of the game was walking a couple hundred feet, getting a GPS reading, reorienting, and walking an other hundred feet before repeating the procedure.  I can say with a fair amount of certainty that we would not have found our way without the help of technology, though I can also say that knowing what I knew, I would not have walked out of the cover of trees without the doo-dads.  Had they stopped working halfway...I like to think we would have found our way out.

Thrilled to have found the hut, PhD, Chris and I went out skiing, both in search of the stashed wine from the previous trip and powder.  We gave up on the first, and found plenty of the latter.  

500 yards from the hut, getting ready for the final descent down the bunny hill, the clouds socked in again.  We had to pull out the GPS just to make sure we were pointed in the right direction.  It's a Burmuda Triangle up there, completely freaky.  We were pretty psyched when the storm intensified overnight and both technological innovations stopped working completely.  At least we were inside.

More than prepared to stay another night if we couldn't make it out, we waited for it to clear, which it did sometime around mid morning.  After the previous days whiteout navigation, the ski out Express Creek to Ashcroft was a walk in the park with some turns thrown in.  A taxi ride for $6 per person got us back to Aspen and our cars where we pointed ourselves east and headed home.  Bittersweet as always.

It was a funny hut trip.  A lot (and by a lot, I mean a lot) of skinning, not terribly many turns, and more relief than elation when we found each of the huts.  I've wanted to do a hut to hut loop since I was first introduced to the concept of hut trips, and now I can say that going to a single hut for several days is a much better use of time if you're going to haul downhill gear in.  That being said, I'd love to score some sort of touring setup like Red had and do long multi-day traverses either camping or with huts in the future.  Something about covering a lot of distance really appeals to me...but then again, I am a bit of an odd one.

A peak named Red

Our group of skiing friends tends to have a major aversion to driving on I-70 any more than necessary.  We often joke that the drive itself is far more dangerous than us playing around in avalanche terrain all day.  But, when driving to the Roaring Fork Valley anyways, might as well make use of the mountains on the way.

We spied Red Peak outside of Silverthorn from Buffalo Mountain last year.  Surrounded by people waiting in line to ski the popular Silver Couloir off the top of the peak overlooking Summit County, we wondered why the neighboring peak to the north was completely empty.  So Chris took a picture and we stored it away in our memory banks.

On Saturday, we returned.  We made use of the Silver Couloir egress trail, looked up the couloir which was rapidly being turned into a mogul field, and continued up valley.  As seems to be typical of the Gore range, it was a headache of a bushwack through the forrest down to the valley floor and up to the base of the mountain that tested both our skinning skills and patience.  

Once above treeline, the climb was trivial.  Long, but trivial.  The weather couldn't have been better creating ideal conditions for our first corn turns of the year and a long, non-convoluted line of snow stretched all the way from the summit down to the valley below. We snacked, took some pictures, hijacked the summit stick, and were on our way.

So we skied.  And hooted. And hollered.  And were completely wiped out when we made it to the valley floor, 2700 feet down.  Those Gores are BIG.  

Lunch was consumed at the bottom of the hill, looking up and giggling.  The thought of the beer and Doritos at the car were the main motivators to get ourselves out of that valley.  The egress was by far the most difficult skiing of the day. Only a few trees were harmed in extracting ourselves from the valley trying to follow a narrow snowshoe trail.

Then we headed to Aspen, home of fur coats, big glasses, and $107 lift tickets.  And on Monday while getting ready to traverse Planet Hath on the way to the Goodwin-Greene hut, winter returned.

But that's a story for tomorrow.

Spring Break '09!

...started with me going to the dentist at the bright and early hour of 8 am to get cavities filled.  I guess not going to the dentist for almost 6 years will do that to you.

Deciding that my jaw was way to numb to go to work, I went to Walt's garage and gave him the rest of my income tax return in exchange for a new bike for this summer.

Still too numb to go to work, I went and had lunch at my favorite Thai place.  Turns out, when half your face is without feeling, even the 'hot' food didn't burn too bad, at least on half my tongue. 

Then the novacaine wore off and I decided I was in way too much pain to go to work.  Going home and taking a nap sounded infinitely better.  No one else was at work anyways.  And I wonder why all my work piles up...

Yet another productive day in the life of Eszter.

Now, real Spring Break starts.  And I get to spend the first half of it hanging out with my favoritest girl ski buddy.  It's gonna be good. 

Curiosity Satisfied

Chris seems to think that I'm the only one who really cares...but in case anyone else out there was wondering what that shack at the top of Mt. Eva was, this is it.

Jason Googled it... apparently it used to be a cell phone tower.  I think the wind may have blown it down.

Reputation

I think Chris and I are starting to acquire a bit of a reputation when it comes to ski touring.  Namely, that we will walk really long distances to, on occasion, ski really cruddy snow.  Still, more often then not, when we do walk really long distances, we do find really good snow.  But sometimes we come up short.  But most of the time, we don't really care.

Even when we luck out, it seems that at the end of a good Gooney tour, many of our companions are sporting the 1000 yard gaze and want to do nothing else but eat, drink beer, and sleep for a very long time.

So for the really stupid stuff, we tend to only invite each other.

The wind forecast said 20-30 mph with gusts of 50.  We vetoed RMNP because it's always blowing twice as hard there as anywhere else, so we went to Brainard Lake instead, where it only blows 1.75 times as hard.  Plus, it has the added bonus of having getting to ride bikes for the first three miles of the approach.

The day started out well with me pretending I'm actually a mountain biker, taking the dirt instead of the snow 50 feet from the car, and promptly breaking a spoke on a badly placed rock.  My spoke tool: safe at home in my saddle bag on my cross bike.  So we put a layer of duct tape on the frame where the tire was hitting and kept pedaling.

Eventually, we ran out of pavement, locked the bikes, and started skinning up towards Lake Isabelle with a plan to take a looksie at Queens Way off of Apache and make a judgment call once we got there.

Judgment 3+ hours of steep skinning and punchy bootpacking later: Wind sucks.

The wind which had been howling all day had been presumably howling all night too turning the snow into a miserable mess of windslab dotted with bits of powder which served only to get your hopes up.  While stability wasn't terrible high on the concern list, the reward to effort ratio of getting up and down the thing was too low even for us.

So we skied the big bowl instead.  Snow was marginal.

And because it would have been sad to walk all the way back there for one run, we climbed a  ways up a south facing couloir with big rock walls.  Snow was sub-marginal, but I haven't seen Chris smile that wide in a long time. 

There would have been plenty to ski up there.  Enough for a corn-camp, even.  But when the snow just keeps beating you up, sometimes, it's just better to call it a day and head home.  There was pizza in the fridge and Avery ESB in the keg.

The wind blew us home across lake after lake and for the first time all day, I thought that maybe the wind wasn't so bad to have around.

As for the mountain biking...I'll get to work on those mad skillz...as soon as I fix my spoke.