Category: Powder

Palatial Accommodations In The White Room 2.13.10

Posted by Frank – February 16, 2010

Days as deep as this one are hard to come by. They might come once or twice a year in Colorado, and only in a few select spots. Utah might get as many as half a dozen days like this in a good year, and the heavy snows of Tahoe may never get like this, with the high water content and winds that are typical of that area. It takes a rare combination of no wind, light snow, no settling, and especially it takes A LOT of snow. Brittany and I were joined by Chris Webster and Pam Rice from Boulder, usual suspects Tom Runcie, Rob Dickinson, and Sydney Fuller, plus Tom’s friend Jeff, also from Boulder. Thankfully there was plenty to go around…

Photo Webster:
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Poverty Gulch 2.1.10

Posted by Frank – February 1, 2010

If I say today was another great day of skiing, it might seem like a broken record. But at least the record just keeps playing my favorite songs over and over again…

Today, I went out with Zach Berman, Rob Dickinson, and Tom Runcie to ski in the upper Slate River area. With another couple of inches overnight, conditions could best be described as “supportable blower”. On our first lap, we stayed in some thicker trees, making it hard to get many quality photos. Here’s one of Rob, however:

We decided to head to another area for our second lap, and Zach had some trouble with his skins. He made it up with a little help from his friends, though:

The terrain above us looked enticing, but se decided to save it for another snowpack, not the one we have now, that’s for sure.

Zach dropped in first off a small cliffband:

Rob followed:

Tom:

Rob finished things up with his ‘O’ face, perfectly describing the whole day:

TR: Steep and Deep 12.30.09

Posted by Frank – December 30, 2009

It’s not just a saying from your favorite sticker of the 80’s, it’s the reality right now in the Crested Butte backcountry. The ski area wasn’t reporting much, but the big orographic zones are working their magic with this storm, and it was deep out there. As in the 10 second face shot deep. Enough talk, here’s the pics… (not a ton, as it’s always tough to get good shots in gladed areas.)

Rob drops in:
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Brittany:
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Sweet sequence of Tom:
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A rare sighting of the Colorado teal mountain monkey:
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All in all, the deepest day since this one last year, and shades of the epicness that was this day, the best one ever. It’s starting to feel like we might be getting somewhere…

Colorado Powder Forecast and Crested Butte Snowfall

Posted by Frank – December 10, 2009

Colorado Powder Forecast is a new website that has been getting a lot of praise, but I thought I would heap on a little more. CO skiers know how fickle our storms can be, and this website seeks to make a little more sense of it all. Check out the “education” tab, for starters, to get up to speed. I’ve learned a lot over the years reading NOAA’s forecast discussion, but this site was a lot easier to understand. Perhaps the best part of the posts is the humor, though- the last couple of posts featured cheerleaders cheering on the oncoming storm, and a Dalmatian representing how spotty the storm was. Combined with NOAA, and the Avalanche center’s forecasts, CO skiers now have a lot of tools at their disposal for weather forecasting. The link is always available on the right sidebar of this blog.

Here in Crested Butte, our snowfall is very dependent on wind direction. Storms coming straight from the South tend to drop all their snow in the San Juans. SW flow can be good, but the more “W”, the better, as true SW flow can once again favor the San Juans. W flow is the best of all, as there are no big mountains to the West of Crested Butte that can steal all the snow. NW flow produces the infamous “Crested Butte Donut Hole”, a frustrating situation when all the mountains surrounding the resort get snow, while the resort sits in a rain shadow and gets very little. Still, the backcountry can get many feet of snow out of these systems, so it’s not the end of the world. Storms out of the N can drop some snow up at Schofield Pass, but usually these storms just make it cold. Other directions are rare and don’t drop any snow around Crested Butte. That’s it for the CB Snow Forecast. This weekend’s storm is currently on track as a Westerly Flow, so cross your fingers…

Missouri Mountain, North Face 4.14.07

Posted by Frank – November 30, 2009

Another old TR update. As I look back at my 14er ski project, Missouri stands out as the one with the best conditions, by a long shot. The North Face is a good, steep route which often has perfect powder conditions like this. This is one fourteener which should be on every skier’s list, regardless of whether or not they are interested in skiing all the fouteeners or not…

My friend Forrest Thorniley sent me a message regarding the North face Of Missouri in the Sawatch range and I decided it sounded like a good idea. My friends Scott Yost and Luke Shaffner decided to join in. All photos without the “biglines” watermark taken by Forrest..

The Arkansas valley got quite a lot of snow, and a lot of it was fogged in making for a beautiful morning. Forrest got this great shot of Princeton.

Some shots of the long skin up:

Which was followed by a boot pack:

All the while, we were eying our potential lines:

The last bit of the climb across the ridge was fun and interesting:

Off the top, Luke:

Scott:

Forrest:

I have a bunch of photos just like this one. Stop making so much snow spray around so I can get photos of you, Forrest ;)

Frank:

Scott, next pitch:

Luke:

Frank:

Forrest:

Some fun looking lines behind me:

The face, post-schralping:

Forrest even made a cool sequence:

Great photos, Forrest, wish I got some better ones of you. April is such a great month- pow, corn, bikes, whitewater, it’s all good.

Hi, My name is Winter and I have Returned 3.25.09

Posted by Frank – March 25, 2009

Axtel 2nd Bowl
Tom Runcie and myself
3.25.09

Well, the end of calendar winter went out without so much as a whimper, with days on end of hot sunshine melting what has now become a fairly average snowpack in most CO mountains. Now that it is officially spring, snow has begun to fall once again. Though the Crested Butte ski area isn’t know for large snowfalls when storms come out of the NW, the surrounding backcountry can do quite well. Axtel may only be a few miles to the W of Crested Butte, but conditions couldn’t have been more different. Here’s the proof: Tom Runcie having the run of the year:
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Where did Tom go? :)
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UPDATE:
I thought I would add Tom’s photos of me as well:

Deep and Light in Crested Butte West 2.12.09

Posted by Frank – February 13, 2009

After skiing the resort, which had about a foot over a couple of days in the early part of the week, it was time to head to the deeper waters 8 miles to the west. Sure enough, conditions were at least 2 feet deep and even though it was a weekday, our group of 6 was joined by another large group of 6. Alex was there to get some photos, while Brittany and I were joined by Rob, Zach, and one of the magnificent tele-twins Seton.

When things are this white and plastered, almost everything looks somehow different and beautiful to me, so I take pictures of things like trees.
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Brittany’s camera batteries died once again, so we took turns with the camera, although she ended up taking most of the photos. Seton:
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Frank:
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I haven’t seen Alex’s shots yet, but hopefully he can publish some of them. I’m guessing his shot here looks pretty good:
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Rob had a rough day. He broke his Dukes when we got to the end of the snowmobile ride, and was going to call it a day. Instead, he floored it down to town and got some demos- a super sweet pair of BD megarides with Fritchis. I think he enjoyed the setup:
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Some more of Frank:
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Meanwhile, Zach had done a lap with the other group and joined us for his 2nd lap:
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Brittany ripping it up on her Katanas:
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Guess the skier :)
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The Goods.

Posted by Frank – March 22, 2008

Rob and Sydney came down from Golden, so I decided to show them an area my buddy Luke and I have doing our best to track out over the last few days. I think they were OK with it :D

The day started off badly for me. I started gunning my snowmobile across some flats below a good sized hill, but forgot that this year’s huge snowfall hasn’t covered ALL the creeks. I saw it at the last minute, braked as hard as I could, then jumped ship as my sled went airborne into the opposite side of the creekbed. I should have jumped a second earlier:

At least I didn’t break my leg, I know people who have gotten really hurt doing the same thing. Here’s the zone we headed to:

We tandem-highmarked as far as we could under the “poop chute” on the left, then the passenger would dive off, and the driver would steer the sled back down, hit the kill switch, and let the sled ghostride back down. Unless you’re Rob, in which case you forget to kill the engine and you have to ski back down and do it again.

Rob’s sled was hungry for some tree, so it grabbed a bite on its’ way down:

We booted up the rest of the way:

Luke loves skiing the Triangle, since the view from his house looks right at it (cliffed-out face on the left):

He even called up his girlfriend and had her shoot some video from their bedroom window. Too funny. Here’s Luke a little closer-up:

Wait, where did he go?

Oh, there he is:

Sydney, enjoying some exposure…

…and the apron:

Rob, laying down an arc up top…

… and making some slough to play in (he’s between the trees):

OK, enough of that, let’s go back up the bootpack and hit the other side. This line is right next to the bootpack, so I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to ski it:

One thing Colorado lacks is spines. So I slashed into this one as hard as I could :)

Fun exit of the spine and into the chute:

My run looked so fun, Rob decided to follow:

Meanwhile, Luke went higher and dropped into his line (look for the snow spray up top):

Blazing out the bottom:

We went back up for another lap. I decided to check something else out, thought better of it, and by the time I made it back to the line that Luke hit on lap #2, everyone had dropped it already, so no more pics, other than the carnage afterwards:

On our way out, we couldn’t help but admire these tracks on the Wang Chung face:

The skiing has been so good, I decided to ski some crappy wind-affected snow on a fourteener in the Sawatch, because I’m demented like that, more on that later…

More from The Deep Day

Posted by Frank – January 25, 2008

The photos that didn’t make the first cut…

Deepest Day Ever

Posted by Frank – January 24, 2008

Where to go, where to go?

Jeremy and I debated this very question last night, eventually deciding on “Let’s talk it over in the morning.” Morning came and Jeremy suggested the Playground, and that was the plan. Thankfully I had dug my snowmobile out a couple of days before, because this is what it looked like (still not dug out from the early January storm):

As we began our journey up the valley, a funny thing happened. The 6 inches of new at the trailhead became 12, and then 24, and then we couldn’t see a damn thing and were struggling to breathe through the faceshot that never ended on the sleds. Screw going all the way out to the playground, we’ve got epic skiing in close. And that was the day. Sorry to all you folks with slow connections, I had a hard time deciding which photos to put up, so I just put almost all of them up.

Me:

I’m short, but I’m not THAT short:

Jeremy’s turn:

Even the skin track was making me giddy:

4 laps later, back to the snowmobiles and some really cool fog while the sun sets on Ruby.

Yet another storm is supposed to come through starting tomorrow. I’ve never NOT wanted it to snow so badly in my whole life. A warm SW storm on top of fluff like that… ugg. If heaven is a place on Earth, I’m pretty sure that Billy was making turns with Jeremy and I today.