With the big snow that fell Monday and Tuesday came the text from Chris Davenport– Sievers Mountain on Wednesday, who’s in? As testimony to both the classic status of the Sievers tour and Chris’s ability to rally the troops, nine of us assembled at Snowmass under bluebird skies and began. Nine is definitely on the large side for a backcountry ski group and with three climbs and ski descents that...
If the set goal for the day was to ski good snow we would have been let down. Instead, Christy, Tim and I went to Hayden on Sunday and filed it under the category of “getting out for some adventure” rather than “epic backcountry day”– and that small label change made it appealing. After all, when I was up here last Tuesday the snow left much to be desired and...
[Christy here]With four ski mountains in the area, locals have an unique opportunity to ski them all in one day. The “four mountain challenge” as it has been called, isn’t something that’s done or talked about very much and there seems to be several different ways it can be executed. Most of the time it’s an Aspen old timer that has gone out for the challenge. Tom Hines and Dick...
Timing is everything. Sometime last Saturday I noticed Bob Perlmutter peering through the telescope at the Sundeck on Aspen Mountain, following the progress of a skier on Ski Hayden (Hayden Peak’s north summit). I had been tracking the solo skier as well and after noting Bob’s interest, knew exactly who to recruit as a partner. After a half dozen more skiers followed suit up there on Sunday and Monday and...
A mid winter ski descent of the 14er Mount Sherman.
Locate this sign and you’ll feel a bit less lost out there With six weeks to go before the Grand Traverse, team Lucky No. 9, a.k.a Christy and I, went out to log some miles, skiing a classic interconnect between the two founding huts of the 10th Mountain Hut System, Margy’s and McNamara. Starting at the Lenado trailhead (8640 ft.), we made our way to McNamara Hut (10,360 ft.), via a linkup of...
Christy and I are happy to report we both set personal records at the Owl Creek Chase this year, and by more than twenty minutes! Congrats, right? Well, not so fast (pun intended). For as much as we’d like to take credit for this, being a result of hard work, training, ski prep, or whatever, there was a more obvious reason. The course was 4 km shorter than usual, reduced from...
A windy day skiing the 13er Mount Buckskin, in the Kite Lake group of peaks near Alma, CO.
Sound like fun? It all depends on your perspective, literally. From it’s top, it’s a fast, steep descent towards Snowmass, and on nordic skis it can almost be scary. When tackling this stretch of the Owl Creek Trail from the opposite direction(pictured), the only thing ‘flying’ is your heartrate, into the red that is. Participants in next Saturday’s 22nd Annual Owl Creek Chase , the 21 km skate race from Snowmass to Aspen, will...
So what’s this all about? Joel Gratz, an enthusiastic skier and amateur meteorologist out of Boulder, Colorado, has launched his Colorado Powder Forecast, with the singular goal of helping powder lovers stay abreast of incoming weather news of the ‘cold smoke’ variety. Distributed via email, his discussion includes day-to-day predictions for snowfall in the various mountain zones of Colorado, sometimes going so far as to predict actual powder quality as a function of the snow’s...
We met in Aspen in 2000 and have been happily stuck in the rockies ever since, getting out in the mountains every day we can, in every season and by all means possible. Read More
