This picture is from way back at the end of September, when we got our first snow here in Bozeman. It was also the day that I got a bunch of fluid pumped out of my lyme-diseased knee and then fainted.

Another shot from last November in Yellowstone, this time of the actual springs themselves. I personally think Mammoth Hot Springs is almost better in winter, as the contrast between the snowy landscape and the incredibly hot spring water is really striking.

Tucker and I skied off the ridge at Bridger again this past Wednesday. We took the Slashman’s Chair up, hiked to the top of the ridge, and then traversed north to the south boundary of D Route. There, we dropped down Boundary Chute and crossed over into Z-Chute. The Z-Fan runout was excellent soft snow but Tucker ran into some huge death cookies. South Bowl was a little on the soft and heavy side, as was the rest of the area. We skied the terrain off of Pierre’s, Deer Park, and Alpine before calling it a day at 4. Not a bad afternoon before class.

D Route South

Tucker traversing along the top of the ridge

Excited and ready to drop in to Z-Fan

Skiing the soft snow of Z-Fan

Montana

I posted briefly a while ago with a panorama taken at Big Sky on the last week of February. The post detailing our run is here and the rest of the pictures are below.

Tucker at the end of the traverse scoping out our line

Skiing above The Bowl and Turkey Traverse

Tucker charging down Gully 1

Tucker and I skied Big Sky on Saturday and made all of one run during the three and a half hours we were there. We took lifts to the top of Lone Peak and then skied down the Otter Traverse to the top of the Dictator Chutes. We put tracks down one of these chutes and into the fresh snow below them, down the The Bowl, cat-tracked it to Buffalo Jump, and then down War Dance to the base area. We descended about 4,000 feet on this massive run, and coupled with the altitude and the intensity of the skiing we were both two wiped out to continue.

I shot a panorama from the top of the chute that we skied and have stitched it roughly together below. More photos are to come.

Yesterday I woke up and checked the snow report, saw the 11″ of fresh and the little blinking blue light on the Bridger homepage that means powder, didn’t believe it, and went back to bed. When I woke up two hours later it was still showing the same thing. Forrest, Tim, Tucker, Megan, and I hoofed it up to the hill. We skied a couple runs in North Bowl and Pierre’s Knob before Forrest and I decided to take a run on the Deer Park lift to ski a gully we’d scouted from below. The gully was awesome, with deep snow and a ton of fun drops and woods.

The clouds lifted and the views were awesome.

Twenty four hour snowfall total right now: 24″

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.

Tim, Tucker, and I got up to Bridger today in time for one run down South Bowl. Bridger continues to be chalk over styrofoam, but it was a good break from the hungover dorm. Yesterday was similar, but the condition on Alpine and North Bowl were a little bit better. God we need snow!

The day got alot better when Megan, Tucker, and I went for our run. We parked the car two miles up Hyalite Canyon road, ran down, and then huffed and puffed our way back up the canyon. The 2 miles covered 200 vertical feet of climbing, which may not seem like much, but I’m used to Cape Cod. And a flat section of the Cape at that. I covered the 4.03 miles in 34:26, which works out to 8:33/mile. I need to get faster. Continual workouts farther and farther up the canyon should do the trick.

My father and I spent the weekend of November 14-16 at Yellowstone National Park. During the winter (pretty much after late October) the only entrance to the park that is open is the Northern entrance in Gardiner, MT. All the roads in the park are closed, except for the road that runs from Mammoth Hot Springs to Cooke City, MT. As a result of this, the park empties.

Saturday morning we left Bozeman and drove down to Gardiner. The town is right on the border between Wyoming and Montana, and is surrounded by the southeast part of the Gallatin Range.

After claiming our tent site at Mammoth Campground we drove up to Mammoth Hot Springs itself. Talk about otherworldly. We walked the entirety of the boardwalk system, including the closed Upper Loop Road. The entire area is full of steaming pits, streams, springs, and puddles. There are several locations where the calcium deposits have choked out entire stands of trees, and one or two locations where trees are in the process of being strangled alive.

It seriously reminded me of the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings.

Saturday night we spent cramped and cold in a one person tent at Mammoth Campground. Despite the uncomfortable sleeping situation, it was good to be back in a tent again. The stars that night were incredible, as I’ve come to expect from Montana.

Sunday we drove the open road into the Lamar Valley and did several short hikes. The scenery was incredibly, and wildlife was everywhere. We hiked up one bluff to the top of a rocky cliff and found several melted areas, clearly from bedded-down elk.

Most of the wildlife was easily visible from the road. We saw several herds of buffalo, two wolves, and a coyote. One buffalo wandered right by us while we were hiking. It looked to be lumbering, but we underestimated the sheer size of the animal and the amount of ground it’s legs allowed it to cover. I don’t think the size of a buffalo can truly be appreciated without seeing one in person.

After our drive and hiking trip, we drove back through Mammoth and headed to the Boiling River. This swimming area is located on the confluence of the Boiling River (run-off from the geothermal features at Mammoth Hot Springs) and the Gardiner River (really freaking cold). The combination of the two allows the pools to be safe to swim in. It feels amazing. On the 1/2 mile walk to the swimming area, we were almost attacked by an elk. The animal appeared suddenly from out of the bush and stood, stock-still, staring at us. We slowly moved past it, trying to be non-threatening, and then it put it’s head down and started walking towards us. Our calm walk became a hurried trot, and the elk bucked it’s head and kicked once. Luckily, that was all it found necessary and it retreated back into the brush. The river was awesome, providing alternating currents of incredibly hot and really cold water, and our dip in (and hurried run away from) the Gardiner River was excellent.

Sunday night we watched the Patriots lose to the Colts in the Best Western of Gallatin. Much better than the tents. Monday morning we hit up the Boiling River again. On our drive back out of the park, just as my dad and I were both remarking on how we wanted to see a mountain goat, we rounded a bend and spotted five or six goats jumping and running around on a sheer cliff just above the road.

We stopped, took pictures, and drove back to Bozeman. Yellowstone is an amazing place.

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.