Wind Chill

We hiked Wire Peak.

Its an amazing peak for its windiness. Everything is calm till right at the top.

Imms has now summited Wire peak and Mt. Aire. We are starting a list...

Wasatch Ski Mountaineering Citizen Race

I went out to the first public citizen ski mountaineering race up at Brighton. 

 Warming up by skinning up to the Snake Creek lift (photo credit Chad, by way of Jason Dorais). I'm in the ninja suit, center, wearing the appropriate attire of lime green Scarpas. 40 people showed up. A super nice crowd.

The course was a series of short and easy laps in one hour, not a full-on skimo race course with tricky technical descents, but it did include a short boot pack which added a simple tactical feature where it was good to sprint out and pass someone before the boot pack goes single file and you'd be stuck in traffic. The race winner did 7 laps in a smidge over an hour. I did 6 laps in about 1:02, and I feel great about that, especially considering I had conventional light touring gear, not the ultralight race gear.

Damn it was fun. There are lots of things one can do to get ridiculously tired, but for some reason doing it on skis, going uphill fast, it just makes sense to me. Consider me hooked.

See the link below to a video of the race:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RjQQ0Vrkkco

The Pine Grosbeak Winter Finch

A big, sluggish finch of conifer forest (mostly spruce and fir, not pines [ironically]), nests in the north or high mountains, wander in flocks when not nesting. Erratic in winter; may invade large areas one year and be absent the next.. Typically uncommon and quiet. Sometimes wanders south for winter; small flocks may feed on berries, maple buds. Can be very tame. Long tail, stubby black bill, two wing-bars. Adult male mostly redish pink and grey, female and young are gray with yellow or orange on head.

Desert Rats of the New Year

Nice grips on the Tongue boulder V4. They apparently named this boulder after me and my tongue.

Sandwiches and campstove tea for New Year's.

This sandstone really is perfect.

My job was to carry Imms and our pack. La Lissa opted for the unwieldy double padzilla. Good job  La Lissa!

Imms opted to hike most of the dry wash herself. All day long she was ecstatic hiking over everything and eating snow, the most happy I'd seen her in a while...

Red, White, and Couloir

Ride 'em, cowboy.

A temperature inversion, but it was still cold where we were. Can you tell that there's a city of one-million people there?

Making our way on Red Baldy, in White Pine drainage, to ski a couloir---hence the title...

Couloir = booting.

The snow was what it was. You savour the reality that once the real snow comes we won't be up here in a 40-degree couloir on Red Baldy anymore.

Earning your turns the hard way: on the way up, but also on the way down. Making trenches in facets is technically skiing because you have skis on your feet, even if they feel like two toboggans on your feet....

Ghetto Skiing

We went to Dog Lake Ghetto ski-style, with blue jeans, mismatched poles, and ski-like non-ski things on my feet.  They have a telemark-style free-heel snowboard bindings and permanent climbing skins on their bottoms, if that makes any sense to you.

They're actually a lot of fun with a kid strapped to your back...

Imms had fun skiing on the lake.

Lookin' PRO-shit-show...

White Pine Facets

No new snow in a while, but the ridge of high pressure on our thin snowpack has subdued our meagre accumulation into unconsolidated sugar snow---faceted re-crystalizations of the original fluffy flakes, the stuff you can't make snowballs with. It hisses as your skis glide by.

We headed up the White Pine drainage, one valley over from Snowbird's boundary but a world apart.

Climbing high on Red Baldy, with views to the Phiperhorn---the tallest peak in the central Wasatch wilderness.

The avalanche danger was low but we practiced our techniques, spotting each other as we zig-zag between safe vantages.

The sugar snow that collected in the little chutes off Red Baldy's northwestern aspects skied OK. Not a bad first day.

Ben's fakie...