Gooney Riders

Ready, set...Winter

I few weeks back, I took my office mate Kim out for her first backcountry ski expedition.  It was after one of the bigger spring stormed that dumped a bunch of heavy snow, and then the sun came out and it turned to cement mush. Skins were globbing, skis were sticking, I spent most of the time explaining that what I did all winter was better than what we were experiencing and promised to take her out again.

May 10th seemed like a safe date for a classic spring ski.  Alpenglow on the peaks, smooth corn, lounging in the sun, drinking beer.  The weather had other plans.

We left a rainy Boulder with hope that we'd break through the cloud ceiling.  Instead, we lodged ourselves firmly into the cloud where as we gained elevation, rain turned to snow, and visbility decreased following an exponential function.

But we were there.  The coffee shop in Empire was closed.  So we skied.

On the down side, it was far colder than I had really wanted to deal with.

On the plus side, we got to ski fluffy snow in May...but seriously, should we really have to be clearing snow off of the car in the middle of spring?  Really?

I aplogized again, I promise a third times the charm re-do, because really, this skiing thing is fun.  Most of the time.

The boys were going to make an attempt on Pawnee today.  Eldora webcam is sunny.  I hope they had better luck with the weather than we did...because this was silly.

Easter Skiing

Today Chris and I went skiing.

It grappled on us for 4 hours straight.

But we finally topped out Frosty, which we've been eyeing since Roper took us up there 3 years ago and have been turned around due to visibility and snow conditions nearly half a dozen times.  How time flies when you're having fun.

I feel like I've spent more time with my skis on my shoulder, booting the last little bit of a slope, this year than any other.  Todays trek, 54 steps.  I counted.

The only thing missing from the top was a view.

We hunkered down waiting for a break in the weather.    

When we could see 15 meters down the slope instead of 5, we skied.  Couldn't see jack. So we skied by feel.  

4 inches of grapple on crust.  It sloughed so impressively that if you used your imagination, you could pretend like you were in Alaska.  I have a pretty good imagination.

The trees looked cold.

The End.  :)

Putt-putt skiing

The objective of the day was this (the boys chose it, I had nothing to do with it):

A set of silly little chutes off of Perry Peak. "Steep enough to watch what you're doing, short enough that it maybe doesn't matter". 200 feet in length, well 350 if you count the half dozen turns it took to get to the top of the chute, and bordering on 45 degrees.  Redcoat went gapers left of the middle rock band (two turns), Chris went gapers right of it (3 turns + 2 ski cuts), I went gapers far right of the trees (sissy line, lots of turns) and Vee went into the trees and out on the rocks and in (3 turns + 1 pillow drop + 1 faceplant).

Had we stopped then, we could have called the day 'Three hours for three turns' and called it good.  But we didn't.  We hiked back up our little knob and dropped off the edge of the world once again into some deep, steep, north facing trees.  It was stupid good.  After getting shut down three days in a row last weekend, I think we deserved it.  Faceshots are even better when you leave your goggles at home.

Switching aspects, we followed the sirens song to some south facing tree chutes which will now be aptly named S-F Chutes.  The S-F...think of two curse words that describe a shallow snowpack, dotted with rocks, the sloughed off with the first person down and you'll discover the two most common words uttered on our way down the thing.  

The top slope looked promising.  Chris center punched it...and the rocks punched right back.  

This was one of those falls that you have to be pretty happy about walking away from.  Even if you did manage to pretty much rip your binding straight out of the ski.  Any one have any AT gear they're looking to sell?  Chris is in the market.

With equipment making the decision to call it a day, we skied the river gully back down.  Chris fell in once, Vee fell in once, and I finally did the pillow drop that I'd been waiting to do all day.

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.

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.

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.

When bad turns to good

The trip really couldn't have started out better: Leaving the driveway with everyone pissed off and fuming at everyone else.  After sitting in I-70 traffic, we parked the cars 100 feet from a blatant 'No Parking' sign and started hiking.  The abundance of 'No Trespassing' signs made us feel like we were back in Ned.

But mountains have a power over people.  It very quickly became impossible to be mad at each other when surrounded by the snow covered sorta covered hills.

Then PhD and Jason both fell through some thin ice on the edge of a lake soaking themselves to mid-calf and the comedy of errors continued.  Lucky for all of us, Sarah (Gooney tour #2 and counting) had a spare pair of socks that they split and we kept hiking towards the objective of the day, the big south bowl of Eva.

Snow, grass, snow, rocks, snow, grass, snow, boot pack, summit.
 
Please proceed down.

Spring conditions produced near corn conditions on the south face slope, and for the winter we've been having, very pleasant snow for an alpine environment.

Then we had to go back up to ski the bowl next door.  Why?  Because we hiked hours to get in there, might as well make the most of it.  And there was a cornice...

Boys like to drop off of these things.

I generally take the non-airborne entrance.

PhD follows his shadow.  Down, down the hill.

Then we admire our tracks and head back down the road. 

 The best part of the day: both cars were still there, no tickets, no bullet holes, and no spray paint.  And PhD had had the foresight to bring beer along to celebrate just another day in the mountains.

Perseverance

With skies clearing and the wind forecast at sub-50 mph, Chris and I (mostly me) decided to take a page out (literally) of Big Ron's Front Range Spring Descents guidebook and head up to the high peaks outside of Alice.  A skeptical, for good reason, PhD came along for the ride.

It was an unexplored area.  We'd skied the peaks north on the Divide: James, Radiobeacon, many of the Indian Peaks all the way to Longs Peak.  We'd skied the peaks to the south: Mines, Russell, Shallow, all the way to Citadel, but this little stretch of mountains: Eva, Bancroft and the surrounding area had yet to be visited from the eastern aspect.  So we went.

The first 3 miles were spent along a dirt road doing the frustrating dance of skinning for 100 yards then taking skis off to walk over another 100 yards of dirt and repeating the process for an eternity.  And it was blowing hurricane force the whole time. I was pretty sure both boys were going to hate me for dragging them to this mountain, that from a distance looked like a giant scree field. 

We could have been skiing powder.

But, for lack of anything better to do, we continued, hoods up, heads down, cursing the wind.  And then, once again, once we turned in the direction of gravity, we lucked out.  That's the only explanation.

Maybe we were procrastinating on having to hike back on the road.  Maybe we decided that the slope would look better with another set of tracks on it.  Maybe we were just motivated.  But we went back up.  Higher this time.  Because we could.

Chris climbed out on a rock pinnacle (I yelled at him about it, and later apologized) and shot this amazing sequence of PhD riding the line in one shot.

The boy and his camera, in my opinion, are nothing short of amazing.

With the sun threatening to set, leaving us a rocky road to hike with headlamps, we headed back.  It had nothing to do with being exhausted.  Luckily, the mountain gave us another 1000 vert of north facing powder for dessert before spitting us out and the lake, sending us home with heads up, the wind at our backs.

Welcome back Winter

After seemingly endless weekends of skiing under blue bird skies, I was starting to forget what winter was really like.  With no new snow in recent memory, I had somewhat resigned myself to a long walk in the woods with Chris, seeing that we couldn't convince anyone else to come skiing.  I had zero delusions about finding soft snow, only that it was going to be bad weather in Boulder, and a day in the mountains is better than a day on the plains. 

A day that started out sweating in base layers quickly ended up in whiteout conditions once tree line was breached.  With visibility minimal, wind blowing in typical Train Tunnel fashion, we quickly hightailed it back into the trees...well, as quickly as can be done when skiing consists of sending snowballs down the slope and following the fall line. 

A new run for me.  A new link up.

We pondered just heading down.  Escaping the cold, going back down to drink beer and eat pizza.  But, in the spirit of the Mountain Gazette: When in doubt, go higher.  So we climbed a scree field covered in ice.  The hiking was less than fantastic, but the ensuing run down, which I generally deem to dangerous to be skiing mid-winter, was indeed fantastic.

Following the river gully down, a new link up to the bottom of Hidden Chutes.
 
We discussed heading down.  But we couldn't resist.  The sun was threatening to peak out.  The snow was piling up.  How often is there powder with a green avy rose?  Skins on.  And up.

Maybe I just set my expectations for skiing really low, so when it's really good, I feel like the luckiest person in the world.  Maybe if I lived in Utah, I'd scoff at 10% snow, but here and now, skiing a near 40 degree face with snow blowing up in blinding quantities, I felt like I must have done something really good to deserve this.

The whole day had a very mountain bike quality to it.  Linking up drainages was like linking up trails.  Really figuring an area out.  What goes where. What's worth the climb, what isn't.  It takes a lot of time to get to know a place, I feel like I'm just getting started here.