Bridger love

The ski tribe met yesterday at Bridger Bowl for Bob and Zoe’s wedding. It snowed all week, so conditions were prime. The day went like this:

10 a.m.  50 people in once piece ski suits hiked the Ridge and skied soft powder together off the Nose. It was dumping.

10:30 a.m.  More skiing. Still dumping.

11:30 a.m.  Coffee and cookies in Deer Park Chalet. The guys with the Gore Tex North Face climbing one-pieces from the early ’90s were clearly the most dialed. Everyone else steams as our suits dry off.

noon  Bronco bump off. 75 people in one piece suits skied Bronco simultaneously, Aspen Extreme style. Total mayhem. I couldn’t stop laughing. That might be as much fun as you can possibly have on skis.

2 p.m.  Zoe skied down the aisle formed by 150 of her friends and family, all sporting one pieces.  She held hands with both of her parents, and looked amazing in a white Bogner suit, a fur-lined hood, and a gorgeous smile. At the end of the ceremony, when she and Bob kissed, it started snowing like three inches an hour.

Let the heavens unleash for love and powder.

The talented Bozeman photographer Dan Armstrong took pics of the day. Check out his photo of the crew here.

 

Face, meet ice tool

As a kid, I always wanted a black eye. I got hit in the face plenty, but somehow it never produced. I realized yesterday, when I got my first ever blackie, I’ve outgrown that desire.

It all started the previous night, when my friend Greg and I were out at the Silver Dollar Bar in Cody, playing pool. We got whooped by a couple of locals, and booted off the tables, so I figured I’d teach him the two swing dancing moves I know. I ended up elbowing him in the chin. Hard.

The next day, we went climbing in the South Fork, at a route called Too Much Goose. I was following, and had reached a ledge after the crux, and was hanging out, recovering. There was a little slack in the rope, and when Greg pulled it tight, it hit my ice tool, which hit my face. Karma.

Now I have a black eye. Everyone at the ice fest seemed to think it was really impressive, but people in the rest of the world have been looking at me a little differently.

I think I could get away with wearing dramatic eye makeup and pretending it’s my new style. Or maybe not, since the last time I wore eye makeup was for the fifth grade play.

Sagebrush, skiing and the Superbowl

People around here are still talking about Madonna’s Superbowl performance, so I figure it’s legit to reminisce about it too.

Pat and I threw our skis in the truck that Saturday morning and drove southwest from Bozeman, through Ennis and Virginia City. In Alder, a ranch town with a population of 100, we turned south toward the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.

That afternoon we skinned up through sage and forested gullies to a grassy ridge. From there, we picked a ski line for the next day, then survival skied back down. Near the truck, the golden evening lit up the rolling sagelands.

We camped in a dry gully a few miles north. I slept in two sleeping bags and two down coats. Sometimes you have to leave cell reception to get a good night’s sleep.

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The next day, skinning on an inch of snow barely covering mud, Pat scouting for elk bedded down in nearby meadows. He told me about the special muley buck draw there, and I wondered if this might be a better place for hunting than skiing. Coyote tracks 1,500 feet higher led to an elk skull. The ivories were gone, and Pat pointed out where the hunter had cut the rack off.

After three hours we made the ridge and found our descent, a little north-facing banana alley that overlooked a ranch and 100 miles of mountains. Pat and Boots dropped in first, and skied about 400 feet down.

Afraid I’d punch through and hit a rock, I entered carefully and stayed light on my skis. Moving snow clinked like hushed glass around me, a shallow river of big wet crystals. The skiing improved after about 20 turns, and I picked up speed in the mellower terrain, bopping lightly between big douglas firs and holding my breath.

Finally, we stopped at the drainage about 1,000 feet down, sticks and deadfall poking up everywhere.

I was afraid the ski out was going to be deadly. Instead, we traversed across the south-facing hillside through open forest for about a half hour, losing elevation fast. We reached the truck, parked by a ranch closed up for winter, at 4 p.m. Kickoff.

Just before halftime we pulled into the parking lot at Chick’s Bar, in Alder. It was so packed with ranch trucks we had to park out back. Inside, we ordered Coors, posted up on the plywood covering the pool table, ate free homemade fried chicken and empanadas, and made a few new friends.

Heebie Jeebies

Nervousness is squirming through me. I just drove back from Livingston, where it was -2 degrees. It’s like 35 here in Bozeman, a half hour away. I’m supposed to drive to Salt Lake for the Outdoor Retailer trade show early tomorrow morning. It snowed a foot in Yellowstone today, and when these two systems collide, we may get a ton of snow.

511 reports the roads are dry all the way to Salt Lake. It feels like a behemoth is coming.

Two or three years ago, the last time I tried to go to OR, it was freezing rain and I made it three hours to Island Park. I turned around, bought myself a pair of Kinko work gloves ($9.99) in West Yellowstone and went home. Wrote it off as a shopping spree.

I can’t get the heebie jeebies outta me. Is it going to dump?! Hopefully I’m not jinxing us.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this interview I did with the quirky, wild and perhaps brilliant Indie ski filmmaker, Greg Stump, for Mountain Outlaw magazine:

http://www.explorebigsky.com/newspost/legend-of-aahhh%E2%80%99s

I didn’t get to meet him, but after 90 seconds on the phone he told me the most inappropriate story I’ve ever heard in an interview. Sweet little Maine boy. We’re trying to bring his new film, “Legend of Aahhh’s” to Big Sky this winter. Here’s a photo of the man himself:

Cooke City avalanche fatalities

Nick, Carly, Pat and I went to Cooke City over New Year’s on a mission to ski, celebrate and write a story. We were there during a pretty serious avalanche cycle, and the day we arrived, two people died in separate slides.

Here’s the first person account I wrote:

explorebigsky.com/newspost/tragic-consequences-in-cooke-city

And photos from the weekend:

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Winter solstice

It’s the longest night of the year.

Hard to believe. Maybe because the solstice is actually the 22nd this year. So, it’s just one of the longest nights.

Pat’s making jerky from one of the big hunks of frozen meat he didn’t want to deal with earlier this fall. And dancing in the kitchen. Sort of.

Recipe: venison, soy sauce, Stubbs barbeque sauce, Tabasco, Jim Beam, maple syrup, Beaver sweet-hot mustard, garlic, Louisiana Cajun seasoning, seasoned salt, Kosher salt and pepper.

“Beer would probably be good in there, too,” he says.

Nick’s in his office, scheming for his super-awesome-business-to-be, flying remote control helicopters and shooting photos and video. We’re crossing our fingers he scores his website name on the auction. The owner is messing with him, and took the name down at noon today when bidding was supposed to end.

Cotton disappeared after walking in and out of the house about a million times while talking on the phone. Enough times that Nick asked, “Is Cotton moving out?”

I’m drinking red wine. And doing research on knee replacements, cartilage repair, clinical trials and foreign stem-cell surgeries (NFL player Terrell Owens flew to South Korea last year to have one of these procedures done, and Payton Manning had his neck done in Europe). It’s kind of half-assed, because I don’t actually want any of these procedures. The other option is to move to Arizona and pick up golf. But I’m not that coordinated.

It snowed over a foot at Big Sky today while I was in the office. Somehow, it didn’t bother me at all. I do sort of really want to ski tomorrow but am not sure if it’ll happen.

We toured up in Hyalite last Sunday with Mike and Steph. I didn’t bring a camera. A clandestine day where we hiked 3,000 vert through thick forest over thin snow to ski 800 wind-affected but smooth and soul-wrenching feet in an alpine bowl.

I thought I was going to collapse halfway up in a nice subalpine meadow. My desk-contoured hips are not strong, and I had the mild-funk that’s been going around town and makes it harder to breathe. Five miles felt like 15. When I finally dragged my slow ass to a ridge top I’d never been to but always coveted, I felt at home. The December light glowed soft and alive. We futzed with gear and where to ski. Then left.

Shortest days of the year.

Island dreams

My parents and I are in Dallas, visiting my grandmother and uncle. It’s raining, and water is pouring from my uncle’s gutters onto the cement outside.

Today, my brother–who’s in Vermont studying his ass off in engineering school–sent a picture of us together in Maine. His girlfriend Caroline took it this summer when the three of us climbed a tree atop Mount Champlain, the highest point on Isle au Haut.

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I tried to conjure up the smells from being there—the century-old wood on the stairs in our house; the dusty sweetness of picking huckleberries; and of course salt, seaweed and rocky beaches.

It didn’t work, so I checked the weather on the island: clear and 34 degrees. The moon is waxing gibbous, which means it rose high in the east at sunset, and is more than half-lit, but not full.

The latest I ever stayed on the island was November 2, at which point I hightailed back to Vermont to vote in the 2004 presidential election. I wouldn’t mind seeing a moonrise over the ocean from that tree atop Mount Champlain on a clear late fall night some day.