This winter break was fantastic. I mean, not uniformly fantastic, there were uneven and possibly even stressful bits thrown in occasionally, so I might only give it a B+, but on the whole it was pretty darn good. On the 22nd of December I headed home to the east coast [where all us self-righteous psuedo-hippy bro's come from!] to see my family for 109 days, and spent a little time in Northern NJ, New York City, and then in Oyster Bay on Long Island's north shore [surprisingly nice given the western stereotype of L.IU as a guido-infested hellhole of kitschy tastelessness] to spend x-mas with my wonderful grandparents, whom I hadn't seen in some time. Their house and property is really quite lovely and sits on 10-ish acres on the water with a duck pond and a barn that serves as the garage. A brook [I'd call it a stream but don't know if it qualifies in size, hah] cuts perpendicular to the house, running into the pond and then on to the ocean, creating a scene I imagine is rather rare in the closer NY suburbs! Not to mention they are a short 50 minute train ride from Penn Station. As much as I hate on the NY metro area, I think their lifestyle has some definite perks. Christmas was mellow and enjoyably subdued, won't bore you with the details, and on the 27th, my uncle Sandy was re-married to his 4th grade sweetheart Jeannie, and very nice and amicable women who is from Denver(!) which is very cool.
I thoroughly enjoyed meeting various new psuedo-relatives, and seeing some of my favorite cuzzies who I had the pleasure of hanging out with over thanksgiving in LA. Did I mention I love my family!?! Such good, salt of the earth people, I can only aspire to be more like them in most aspects of my life. My mom was telling me some stories about growing up on our family 'farm' [which we all just called 'the place'], a 75 acre estate in the Dix Hills neighborhood of Huntington, NY, and it brought back some really warm memories of my own childhood there, the privilege of being able to run around 75 acres of fields and forest, building tree forts, ziplines, bike paths, not fenced into some 1/4 acre lot in the McMansion-burbs, a kind of childhood free of videogames, TV and internet, just enjoying being outside and getting my hands dirty every day. In short, the type of childhood I'd hope to give my kids some day, and one that seems to be increasingly rare in America today.
Anyways, I digress! After X-mas, I flew back out to Denver on the 31st, and, in an improbably successful whirlwind of travel, somehow made it to Telluride that evening after picking up my friend Stu and my ski gear in Boulder, to celebrate the New Year with my roommate Alex at his family's lovely house in downtown Telluride. I also got to hang out my my homegirl Ashley Story, who grew up in Telluride and whose family has been in the valley for generations. We had an amazing time celebrating New Years Eve in front of the San Miguel County Courthouse, a T-ride tradition, and, given my tiredness/hungover-ness the next morning, perhaps a little too much of a good time, but i wouldn't trade it for the world. The next day, after sleeping in a bit, Alex, Olive, and myself hiked up to Bridalveil Falls outside town, a classic Telluride hike, and got a nice little workout trying to keep up with Olive, who belied her usual appearances as a lazy, chubby pitlab, by bounding through knee-deep fresh snow for several hours.
The next day, sufficiently rested and relaxed from traveling/imbibing, I made it onto 'the hill' for a day of skiing. I met up with few locals who showed me around part of the Bear Creek Drainage, Tellurides pre-eminent backcountry area, a huge hanging alpine valley immediately east of the resort. WOW! What an incredible asset to the area. Big, dangerous, and avalanche prone for sure, not a place to ever venture alone or without proper gear, but for the experienced backcountry traveller, a dream come true. To start with, the terrain is extremely complex and technical, with most of the more prominent lines dead-ending in close-out cliffs, requiring a degree of familiarity with the terrain to find little egresses around the cliffs through the trees. Said trees, which, due to their density and aspect, usually hold superb powder, are some of the most technical I have skied, on par with the nastiest Vermont glades, for comparison! The views and solitude in the drainage are incredible, as is the exposure. As I understand it, the ski company is considering an expansion into the drainage, which, given the pristine backcountry nature of the area, the technicality of the terrain, and the existing extreme terrain already in the resort, I think is an extremely bad idea, but then again, I'm not the one calling the shots.
Probably the best run I had during my 4 or 5 days at the resort started directly off the top of chair 9, through the BC access gate and down through steep, shaded, well-spaced East Vail-esque conifers that brought me into a steep, open chute. After a dozen or so superb turns in fluffy fresh, i doglegged left to avoid a huge cliff at the bottom of the chute, through some variable sun-baked stuff in aspens and down into another excellent, techy chute, this time framed by big cliffs of spectacular reddish-brown volcanic rock on both sides. After a final traverse left again across some nasty bare-ish stuff and i was rewarded with an excellent treed pillow line for about 500 vertical feet, which emptied into a spectacular clearing at the site of an old mine, with the headframe and hoist cables still looming over the hillside. Emerging from the trees to see the ghost of a former mine perched on an improbably steep hillside, covered in 4 feet of powder and sloping down to town is definitely one of the coolest experiences I've had skiing; I had to stop and reflect a bit before continuing downhill. Another 500' of so of wonderful aspens, and i was on a hiking trail in the valley floor, which brought me down to town and a quick block-long traverse on the rec path back to the lift. Wowza! What a place. Can't wait to get back when the conditions are even better and more filled-in later in the season. Love Telluride. Such a special place.
On Thursday, I headed down to Silverton for 2 days, which has been a place I've been longing to check out for years now. I've heard a lot of hype and hoopla about the mountain, the snow, the experience, ect... and i have to say, it did not disappoint. What a place! To start with, it's in the middle of nowhere. While only 10 or so air miles from home base in Telluride, getting there in winter requires an almost 2 hour drive in order to circumvent some of the most rugged terrain in the Rockies. These mountains are BIG, more reminiscent of the Cascades or the Coast Range than the Rockies. Once in Silverton, another 6 miles or so up a valley north of town put's you at Silverton's luxurious 5-star base area, an oversized yurt, a permanently-parked schoolbus [the 'rental shop'], and an ancient double that looks like it came from A-Basin circa wool pants and wooden skis days. This is the real deal, all about skiing and being in the alpine, and the steady hum of helicopter traffic bringing clients wealthier than I up surrounding peaks is more reminiscent of British Columbia than Colorado.
At $160 a pop, heli-accessed runs are not cheap, but still, when compared to similar operations up north, are relatively accessible to the general populous. What is not accessible to the general populous is the terrain here, which ranges in difficulty from hard to downright terrifying. Letting my ego guide me, after a quick warm-run down the liftline, I set off to a huge, sloping bowl 15 minutes op the ridge, called "mandatory air." Perhaps if I had thought more about the implications of this name I might have had some reservations, but the sight of all that unskied powder a week after the last big storm overwhelmed my powers of deductive reasoning. I set off and soon was charging down perfect, 35-45 degree powder fields, towards an unseen constriction and drop-off below. Well, that 'constriction' turned out to be one of several options: a heinous rubble-filled 60 degree chute with jagged chunks of San Juan volcanic rock on both sides, or a treed but equally steep slope to the right. Well, wanting to preserve my bases a bit, I chose the tree line, which was also appealingly [dubiously?] untracked. A few steep jump turns down it became apparent this might be a terminal line of sorts, as it funneled into another chute of unknown steepness/length.
I set off and soon the sound of swooshing powder around my skis was also interspersed with the 'chhhhh' of rock on p-tex. At the 'crux' i realized my options consisted of either downclimbing a 15-foot section of class 5 munge, or saying goodbye to a good part of my skis. I opted for the downclimb, and, several hairy minutes later, was back in my binding and enjoying some of the deepest turns of my season in the untracked lower 1/2 of the couloir. Funneling me down to the cat track in the valley floor, the mountain seemed designed implicitly for skiing, with gravity and slope somehow co-existing in a precarious truce. I hooted and hollered and flashed a fifty-dollar smile, as if that was need to justify the minor cost of an off-season lift ticket here. Wow. Snow in my pants, ice on my stubbly chin, little curlicue's of p-tex trailing off my skis.... worth it? Absolutely.
