Jason Leonard and I went backcountry skiing again today, and tried to access some of the deeper powder stashes in the Crested Butte backcountry via snowmachines. Well…we were in for a bit of a surprise, as the ususally broken track out there, hadn’t had any sign of traffic since our last big storm cycle, so we were left with the task of breaking trail on the sleds through sometimes 5′ wind drifts of fresh snow.

My Yamaha 700 did alright, as did the old trusty Arctic Cat 580 Jason was on, until things got real thick around the bend a little over a mile from the trailhead. Over an hour later and multiple holes dug out of with stiff backs, we opted to retreat with our tail between our legs and find some closer more easily human powered accessible backcountry ski terrain.

In a great salvation to the day, we found some great open gladed skiing amongst the aspen groves 1000′ above the trailhead and a quick 30 min skin away. The abundant sunshine and warm temps (mid-30’s) let us enjoy multiple laps on a perfect pitch between the aspen groves of moderate angled terrain and sun softened thick powder skiing that we were able to milk right back to the useless snowmachines and the car.

Next time, we’ll let someone else breaks trail for us.

—Jayson Simons-Jones (Guide)

cbguides

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 8:46 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.