Last week Rob & Liane joined us all the way from the great north-country of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, for an overnight hut trip in the beautiful townsite of Gothic, CO just outside of Crested Butte.

The morning of our departure for the hut we were greeted with 14″ of fresh snow, that held an incredible atypical for Colorado,  2.5″ of water! This led to some thick, yet consistent and fun, wet powder skiing and made Rob & Liane feel somewhat at home, as conditions were more reminiscent of an East Coast storm then a Crested Butte backcountry storm.

We headed out to the hut with a tour up and over local backcountry skiing spot, Snodgrass Mountain, dropping down to Gothic and the East River Valley via the 1400′ vertical shot known as ‘3rd Bowl’.

Rob & Liane got a true taste of steep and deep Colorado backcountry skiing, as we sat on the Gothic roadgrade admiring our tracks from below. Then off to the hut where we spent the evening relaxing on the couches by the woodstove, enjoying a fresh cooked hearty winter meal of shrimp tortellini in a parmesan-basil cream sauce, and trading stories of past adventures in the Adirondack mountains by foot, ski, rope, and boat.

Our next and last day dawned clear, sunny, and warm and although it was an incredible day for ski touring, cold overnight temps following the previous warm and sunny day resulted in some early morning crust conditions, that allowed us a mellow start to the morning as we waited for things to soften up on our tour out.

On our way back out the beautiful East River Valley, we enjoyed a short tour back up to the Gothic / Snodgrass saddle, where we enjoyed another 1,000′ or so of good and soft powder skiing up high, coupled with a few sets of challenging, character building turns down low. We arrived back at the trailhead by mid-afternoon under increasingly cloudy skies and put a fitting end to a great trip filled with a short 2-day window of fresh snow, sunny skies, and warm weather.

—Thanks for a fun trip.

Jayson Simons-Jones (Your Guide &  fellow ‘Dacks lover)

cbguides

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 8:13 pm and is filed under General, Skiing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.