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Split’s North Face

It is one of California’s big mountains, colorful, complex, and consequential, and for ski mountaineers, it holds not one but several of the range’s most coveted lines.

Split’s south face is a backcountry skier’s dream—if you can get there. Wrap around to the east, and you’ll quickly encounter an astounding abundance of ski extreme options. But it is Split’s snowy north face (more…)

Posted in Skiing | 6 Comments

Skiing Whitney’s North Face

Whitney has eluded me. When I first tried to ski this mountain the defeat was so humbling and so absolute it was years before I dared return to the Sierra backcountry.

But, every winter, the thought remained on my mind. The allure of climbing Whitney is obvious. The allure of skiing Mount Whitney, perhaps not so obvious. Like many of the Sierra’s big peaks, Whitney (more…)

Posted in Skiing | 5 Comments

Steep Turns & ‘Edge of Never’

One of the things I love about ski mountaineering is that there’s always something new to learn. Over the course of this season I’ve been trying to improve my steep skiing technique, sparked in part by studying last season’s C2N footage. The video revealed I was using a bit of a stem to initiate my steep turns. I wanted to see if I could eliminate the stem to produce a more reliable turn (more…)

Posted in Skiing | 2 Comments

Muir’s East Buttress

In a way, I wished I’d never seen it. I was having a nice, easy backcountry skiing season, perfectly fine, and I didn’t need any trouble. I didn’t need to do anything special. I didn’t need to be special. I didn’t need to be obsessing about hanging snowfields and massive, dead-drop cliffs. And I especially didn’t need to start a war between who I thought I was and who I wanted to be (more…)

Posted in Skiing | 13 Comments

The Paradigm of the Extreme

There in some understandable confusion over how, if the hazard level was rated low throughout the Eastern Sierra, two people could have been killed by an avalanche this past week on Split Mountain. Over at ESAC, Sue Burak elaborates a bit on the subject in her May 1st advisory, writing:

“Avalanche advisories do not apply in extreme terrain for obvious reasons.” (more…)

Posted in Skiing | 3 Comments

395 Report (South)

Scouted Highway 395 between Olancha and Independence this past weekend. As has been the case the past few years, snow coverage varies greatly depending (I assume) on wind effect history. It appears generally true, once again, that high altitude north faces have been blasted clean. This is not universally the case, but given how much snow fell over the course of the season, if you’re expecting Tyndall’s north face to be blanketed with snow, for example, you’ll be disappointed (more…)

Posted in Current Conditions, Skiing | 9 Comments

Thoughts On That Helmet Article…

An article in Ski Canada Magazine examining helmet use stats in the US is generating quite a bit of buzz right now in the ski world. I’ve read the article and given it some thought, and my impression is that it’s easy to misread and/or misinterpret the article’s conclusions.

Let’s take a closer look at what the authors wrote: (more…)

Posted in Science, Skiing | 5 Comments

Back from the Bird

Back on the grid here after four fun-filled days at Snowbird, Utah. Weather really treated us well—it snowed every single day, but was kind enough to break yesterday for a dazzling dose of Wasatch powder.

I wasn’t planning on doing any work, but I ended up demoing a bunch of powder skis, and I learned a lot about what’s out there. Not all rockered planks are created equal. More to come…

Posted in Skiing | 0 Comments

Snow Valley $199 Pass

One of my never-ending quests is finding an appropriate place to ski with my four-year-old son in SoCal.

We drove up to Snow Valley today, motivated by distant memories I had of high-quality easy intermediate terrain. As it turns out, Snow Valley is offering $199 Season Passes, good for the remainder of this year and all of next season (more…)

Posted in Skiing | 0 Comments

Andrew McLean’s Side-Step Tutorial

In cased you missed it, Andrew McLean put up an interesting chute-skiing tutorial video on his site a few days ago. I recommend checking it out. What I really like about the video is that it shows what real ski mountaineering/steep skiing often looks like: you traverse in, feel things out, discover conditions aren’t exactly what you expected, and wind up spending the majority of your “skiing” using whatever techniques and tricks best work to get you down in once piece.

While I find Big Mountain Movie Skiing™ just as thrilling as everyone else, real, human-powered skiing deep in the backcountry is often very, very different (more…)

Posted in Skiing | 3 Comments

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