At the end of January my Dad and I headed north to British Columbia for four days of heli skiing with CMH. We caught the tail end of a week-long cloudy pattern which yielded three days of great powder skiing below treeline and one day in the high alpine. All of it was new for me so I did my best to soak in every aspect of the experience. Heli skiing, though expensive and probably even a tad ridiculous, sure is a wild ride. Keep reading…
Over the past several years we’ve been able to find decent early-season skiing in the high country by Thanksgiving. A slow start this year though had a lot of us waiting into December to head up for that first ski day (myself included). Well over the past ten days a series of storms finally dropped some real snow up high, so we decided to head up to Berthoud Pass and get our ski seasons rolling. Read more…
Savage Peak resides in the Holy Cross Wilderness 6 miles southwest of Holy Cross itself. Though there are some good summer hiking routes to its summit, a wild and aesthetic couloir on it’s northeastern flank makes for a good reason to lug skis back in there. Savage’s namesake couloir runs roughly 1,200 ft from near the summit down to Missouri Lakes. Read more…
I call this a bucket list item for a number of reasons. First, the Sangres see a snowpack like this once maybe every 5 years or so. Second, of all the grand peaks in the Sangres, from the town of Westcliffe, Horn Peak kind of steals the show, and the East Face is its showcase. There’s nothing really special about the route itself – it’s basically a long version of Crystal’s East Face or a less interesting version of Red’s Southeast face. Keep reading…