SierraDescents | Category | Skiing
November 17, 2010
The South Fork Slide, Revisited
Sometime during the '09-10 winter, a large avalanche took place on Alto-Diablo Peak's northeast aspect, wiping out a portion of the South Fork Trail. When my partner Al and I saw (more)
November 6, 2010
Bon Voyage, Dan!
My friend Dan is going skiing on Monday...for a year. After a brief tour of several U.S. ranges, he and his wife will leave for the Himalaya, with plans to summer in the Andes (more)
May 8, 2010
Last Days at Baldy
Looks like this weekend is it for skiing at Mt. Baldy resort. I was there yesterday to enjoy one last day on my pass, closing out what has been a surprisingly strong year at the (more)
April 24, 2010
Snow Creek
If there is one singularly conspicuous omission in the SierraDescents repertoire, it is unquestionably a ski descent of San Jacinto Peak via Snow Creek. There are many fine peaks (more)
March 31, 2010
West Baldy
This past weekend some friends and I took a professional videographer up West Baldy to try to nab some footage of Southern California backcountry skiing for a Ski Channel (more)
March 22, 2010
The Couloir to Nowhere
I first saw it in January 2008. My friend Bill Henry and I were climbing Mount Baden-Powell for a modest day tour in Southern California's San Gabriel Mountains. As we stood atop (more)
February 7, 2010
The San Jacinto Report
Maybe one of the things to remember about an El Nino year is that the storms love to ambush the Southland. I don't think anyone was expecting the rain intensity we saw Friday (more)
May 9, 2009
Baldy Freak Show (aka: Skiing the North Face)
Coming off my Tyndall adventure, I thought it would be nice to do an easy tour this weekend...so I decided to ski Mount Baldy's north face. Okay, maybe my difficulty scale got (more)
May 2, 2009
Tyndall in a Day
The plan was simple: climb and ski Mount Tyndall in a single day. There were good reasons to try—and good reasons not. But it is the lot of the occasionally ambitious ski (more)
April 19, 2009
Shepherd Pass
The plan was simple: Tyndall in a day. But as I made the pitch to my climbing partners, one by one they found various reasons to be elsewhere. And who could blame them? To get (more)
April 3, 2009
Previewing the Apocalypse
Well, instead of snow, so far we're just getting more dust. As the afternoon progressed, the sky grew more and more pink, and the snow started to look as if God had sprinkled (more)
March 31, 2009
Black Iron Bowl
Checking in here from Telluride, Colorado. This was a last-minute trip, but opportunity came knocking, so I thought I'd shirk my Sierra responsibilities and head east to the (more)
March 14, 2009
Mount Baldy – North Face & Dare Chute
Well this was a fun day! For today's ski agenda, I thought I'd climb up Mount Baldy, give the north face a look-see, ski a piece of it if feasible, then climb back up to the (more)
March 2, 2009
Memory Lane: Arizona Snow Bowl
Well we're working our way back home now, with a stopoff in Flagstaff for a few days. I'd kind of hoped to do some sort of backcountry tour out here, but a week of record temps (more)
February 27, 2009
Gold Hill No. 9
9:44 am atop Telluride, elevation 12,570'. A cold wind blasts across the ridge as my brother and I hop off the Revelation Lift and check the signs near the patrol hut. The (more)