El Nino has not been very kind to the Bridgers this season. However, after a two week drought and some really crappy skiing, we finally got some snow this last weekend. Alot of it, actually.

Friday, January 22

We got our 1-2″ overnight, and it was snowing lightly all day. Nothing really worth mentioning, but a couple pictures to share.

The skiing was about a thousand times better with the fresh snow.

…and deep in some places…

Fresh snow makes everything more fun.

Around 2pm, some weird clouds moved in and the storm was on.

Saturday, January 23

Saturday was an awesome, yet frustrating day. Friday night, all of my friends decided it would be fun to get really, really high and drunk. I abstained because I had checked the weather forecast and knew there was pow coming. I was ready, and asked everyone I was going with, including Tim, who was my ride, if they could be ready to go in time for Bridger Bowl’s 9:00 AM opening. Tim told me he didn’t want to be woken up any time before 10:30, but that he would be ready to leave right away. I fought him but he was drunk and adamant. So I figured that 10:30 would be the best I could do.

Saturday morning I woke up, woke up Tucker, and got some errands done around town. There was about 6-8″ of fresh in town, and Bridger was still getting dumped on, with 8″ reported at opening bell. The snow was supposed to continue all day. I got back to campus at 10:25 and Tim was still asleep. Tucker was ready to go. At 10:30 I woke up Tim. At 10:45 I woke Tim up again, and he proceeded to very, very slowly get ready to go…and walk down to get breakfast. I followed Tim and Tucker down to get food, and sat, fuming as they slowly worked their way through the meal. At that point, Tucker and Adam decided they wanted to switch skis and snowboard for the day, and wanted to stay on the easy areas to get used to the new equipment. This meant I would be skiing alone, which I hate. They justified this insanity by saying “It doesn’t matter, the skiing won’t be that good anyways”…

We finally managed to leave campus at 12:15PM. I was very, very grumpy at this point and didn’t even care that I’d left my backpack and helmet behind and that we had to turn around to get them. By the time we got on the lifts it was 1PM and we only had 3 hours to ski the 12″+ that had accumulated by then. I quickly abandoned my idiotic friends and booked it over to the Bridger Lift. One run down Avalanche Gulch, which was still somewhat scrapy, and I skied down to Pierre’s Knob, where I met up with Claire and Mike, who fortunately appreciated the fact that it was snowing and that the skiing might be good on some interesting terrain. Over on the south end of the resort the snow was beginning to bond with the leftover crust, resulting in a smooth bed surface for the quickly accumulating snow. The day just got better and better as it went on. In the unique kind of good mood that can only result from fresh powder, I finally ran into Tim, Tucker, and Adam towards the end of the day and convinced them to ski some woods (excellent) and the South Bowl with Clare and I. By 4PM it was positively dumping and I couldn’t wait for Sunday.

Clare ripping South Bowl on Saturday

Sunday, January 24

Trying to avoid the waste of time that was Saturday morning, I lined myself up a ride to Bridger in time for opening bell at 9AM. It snowed all night and the snow report stated 9″ fresh, with a 17″ 24 hour total. Parking all the way down in the sunny K lot, we hit up the Bridger lift first, watching skiers rip waist deep powder on the way up. Halfway up the lift, we entered a snowstorm. The traverse over to Avalanche Gulch was painful, as I could see people above me getting faceshot after faceshot. There was way more than 9″ of snow up top. My guess at the total when the lifts started turning on Sunday would be 2.5-3 feet.

Avalanche Gulch was…interesting. It had already been skied, hard, and was somewhat scrapy. I managed to lose a ski deep in the powder, but luckily only had to hunt around for about 5 minutes until I found it. The runout to Pierre’s Knob was fun and deep, with knee deep shots all the way down. We skied Pierre’s Knob and South Bowl until around noon. It was very similar to the day before, only deeper. The woods were excellent, and I hucked one ten footer and landed in snow deeper than my head. It was generally waist deep up in the bowl, and skiing very well. Oh, and it was still dumping hard.

Around noon, we hiked the Fingers, and were surprisingly one of the first groups to have that idea. We hit Second Finger first, which was tracked but just barely, and held multiple faceshots and very, very deep snow. The hike up was tricky, with the bootpack being somewhat buried. It was very easy to step out of the bootpack and plunge into waistdeep fresh snow.

Bootpackin’ in the Blizzard

View this photo in the porfolio.

Standing above 2nd Finger

I handed my camera off to Clare for my trip down the 2nd Finger

Steep and Deep

After the first hike, we hiked up again, this time all the way to the Gate that leads to the ridge proper. We briefly considered 4th Finger, but with the limited base that we have (only 55″ it was still really narrow and somewhat rocky. 3rd Finger was the way to go. Being somewhat narrower than 2nd, it held deeper snow. Unfortunately, the filter on my camera fogged so I don’t have very many pictures of it. At the bottom I traversed over into 4th Finger and skied faceshots to the traverse across South Bowl, where I promptly snagged a snow snake, lost my goggles, and tumbled in a cloud of fluff to the bottom of the chute. My goggles got totally covered in snow, inside and out, and were unusable for the rest of the day.

After The Fingers we headed over to Slushman’s, where I found Heaven.

The Liftline to get to the Chairflift to Heaven

In the above shot you can still see some of the condensation from the fogging. This would bother me for the rest of the day.

On Slushmans it was possibly snowing harder and what had accumulated was possibly deeper. Alyssa and I skied out into Mundy’s Bowl, the same place Tucker and I had skied earlier in the week. It couldn’t have been more different, however. Alyssa led me into a rocky, terrifying, lower traverse over a cliff band that dumped us out into a wide open field of powder…every turn was a faceshot, and the field dumped out into a area of half-buried trees which had trapped anything that was blowing around. The snow in these trees was untouched and DEEP. I’ve never seen snow as light and fluffy as what feel yesterday. I skied tight turns in chest deep snow through the trees all the way down to the ski area boundary where we traversed back to Slushmans for another round of exactly the same ridiculously good skiing. This time I stayed in the middle of the trees and skied the canyon, which was just as deep as the trees and formed a natural halfpipe that I was able to ski up and down the walls of, hooting and hollering the whole time. It was snowing so hard that taking pictures became a little difficult, both because the camera would try and focus on snowflakes and because it was very difficult to see anything through the snow.

Face shot in the blizzard

Unedited picture. Those are not clouds. It really was snowing this hard.

Slushmans is now my absolute favorite lift. It accesses the most dynamic, fun, expansive terrain of anywhere I’ve skied. Even though most of the daily crowd was there on Sunday, it was still holding fresh snow until closing time. The hiking traverse if you choose to ski all the way to the bottom is definitely worth it. It accesses a spot about 20′ short of the top of the ridge, and is publicized intimidatingly enough so as to keep people out who shouldn’t be there. I’m going back up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this week to try and get at whatever powder is left.

What a difference two weeks makes. We did things much smarter this time. A storm rolled in Tuesday and lasted all night, leaving us with about 6″ of snow here on campus in Bozeman and an unknown amount in the mountains. Everything looked white though.

We left campus around 7:30 and were hiking at 8:00.

The hike up was much easier this time. The road took us to the base of the Pierre’s Knob lift. From there, we hiked up a cat track to a spine that took us along the cat track to the top of Pierre’s Knob.

A 20-30 minute bootpack up the spine took us past the Finger chutes and along a meadow. At the top of the fourth Finger we stopped and clicked in. Below us were the chutes, one of which looked really nice, and three others which looked rocky. The meadow was covered in about three feet of fresh, albeit tracked powder. We’d been told by some other hikers that the meadow was just grass and there would be no rocks. Ultimately, I decided that I’d have all season to ski the Fingers in much better conditions.

My first turns down the meadow were absolute bliss. Not quite cold smoke powder, but certainly the closest I’ve ever seen. I tracked up my swath of meadow and the rest of our group followed.

Alex enjoyed her first turns of the season.

Sam followed and found the goods.

After the meadow we skied the cat track back down to the car. Top to bottom powder skiing on October 29th? Welcome to Montana.