Colorado Backcountry: Vail Pass

Photo: Dave B. Rider: JP Location: Vail Pass
Dave (iskibc), RJ and I met up at Vail Pass on Friday before sunrise. The last adventure the 3 of us went on was the first day of the season this year (Jones Pass) after the huge dump in October. Looking like another epic adventure we geared up and hit the trail. We made our way up the snowmobile access road and near the top broke east for those sweet cliffs and pillows above Vail Pass Lakes. Dave is a very strong backcountry skier and hiker, he broke trail most of the way and found us a nice spot to break before our first line. You can see from the video that there is plenty of snow around, we found a couple feet of powder on most lines. We took turns dropping this steep section with small pillows and cliffs, landings were complete whiteroom. We started a nice skin track back up the ridge to the top, on the way up we noticed a sweet face that looked pretty safe. We decided to track it up and set up basecamp here for a while. Probably 4-5 laps later we moved on down the ridge to some steeper untracked areas. We took turns taking laps, hitting fresh lines and filming each other from a couple of different cameras and angles. Around 3pm, snow started to fall.. we had one more line in mind and made our way back up. After shredding said line, weather was starting to turn and so we dropped and started to make our way down to the pass lakes. Still a few miles of hiking to get back to the cars, we are spent. It was a long day with lots of deep powder turns, fun drops and steeps. This is a great spot to go backcountry skiing or snowboarding, although it is a lot work if your like me and don't use a split board. According to Dave's GPS we logged around 9 miles total.

  
Dave and I both had our video camera's so there are two edits to the days footy. As you can see from the video we had a full day of hiking, deep powder turns, a few solid hucks, some crashes, lots of snow, and a beater or two.

Vail Pass Deep Video - (right click - save as)Vail Pass Deep Video - (Fast Mirror Link)iskibc's TGR Trip Report & Videoiskibc's TGR Picture Thread