Pic of the Day: April 21

Back from a couple day hiatus. Funny how when you have all the time in the world you can sometimes not have time to get a quick blog post done. Things are pretty backed up right now with editing photos and landscaping projects, but they'll get done eventually. I'm hoping for a few more pow days this season. We're definitely getting to that point where each storm could be the last one, though.

The Best Run, The Best Season

I realized last year would end up being the best season of my life on February 1st, driving home from a big day in a new zone. The snowpack was fat and the storms were lined up every couple of days.

On an exploratory mission to one of Utah's lesser traveled mountain ranges, I saw the face that Jenny is riding in this photo. It looked perfect from afar. Big and wide open. It instantly became my obsession.

I didn't have to wait long to make it happen. Three days later a bitter cold storm blew through Utah and put down a foot of cold smoke in this zone. It was go time. I'd been easing Jenny into bigger and better splitboard missions at the time and she was wanting a big day. I felt she was ready.

The approach to this zone was pretty long. Most of it was mellow walking on an old Jeep road but when you get up high, it gets steep. I thought we were gonna get shut down for most of the approach. While we were skinning up the road, it went from bluebird to socked in. We couldn't see the face we were hoping to ride anymore.

The skinning became difficult once we broke into the alpine. The ridge I wanted to go up was way steeper and was also scoured down to a pretty stout sun crust. After side-hilling to a bench, we stopped for lunch and contemplated our options.

At this point, I thought we'd bail. It was 2pm and we still had a long way to go to reach the summit. The bench we were on was also our last turn around point. If we decided to keep going up, we were pretty much committed to topping out. Jenny wanted to keep going. I told her we'd give it a shot if the snow was easier to skin up on the north aspect. It was, but it was also pretty steep. As long as I put in a good skinner it could be done.

We topped out with less than an hour of useable light. Even better, the clouds had broken to reveal an absolutely beautiful evening. I was super proud of Jenny for pushing through some difficult skinning, all while dealing with temperatures below 0 the whole time. We still had to get down though, so the day wasn't done yet.

We rode over to our drop in point, I did a quick assessment of stability and determined it was good to go. I dropped first and rode down about a quarter of the way. The snow was perfect. Bottomless, and blower. It felt like Japan. Jenny rode down and regrouped at our safe zone. At this point, I told her to just send it all the way down to the trees at the bottom.

In this photo, the wind is blowing left to right across the shot. So every time Jenny made a turn , her powder cloud would end up blowing back over her after she would blast out of it. If you look closely, it looks like the snow is grabbing onto her as she's coming out of this turn. This is one of my all time favorite shots.

We got back to the car just after dark. Cold, tired, and stoked. It was the best day of the season.