Doug invited Little Spoon and I along for a few days of ‘Man Skiing’ up in Montana.
Since I nearly moved to Bozeman a while back I was uber keen to finally ski the area.
We had enuf equipment for half of Africa to ski…. downhill gear, skinning gear, couple of sleds, all the ropes required for towing 3 people per sled, kite ski and just the usual stuff for an 8 day road trip.
And all our avy gear – yeah you aren’t allowed to ride one of the lifts unless you have a beacon on. I’ve never seen it before but they have this sensor that you have to use to check your beacon before every ride on that lift.
There was a bit of hiking involved…. here is Little Spoon bootpacking up the poma/j-bar line. This is a 20 minute hike that goes straight up!!! But ski patrol have their own poma that nobody else is allowed to use. Keeps the muppets out I suppose.
Once on the ridge…. it is hike along the ridge. Most of these folks are part of our crew. Final destination is a lot further out of shot – about an hour away.
This was our destination….. (we skied the trees that go left to right – I put the line in on the cover foto). See that line down the middle (Hourglass), we didn’t ski that, see the line to the left of it, we didn’t ski that, we skied through the trees and popped out at the bottom there. Good thing some of the crew skied it before me because the line that I had in mind resulted in a 50 foot bluff.
This is the view looking down that run…..
