Colorado Backcountry: Steamboat Springs

Had a great bluebird day on Saturday riding at Steamboat. No fresh snow for a while, it was very icy in most spots. The trees and the backside of the mountain seemed to hide the best snow. Around noon, I met up with Wil @ 120 Days of Powder and his crew for some backcountry adventures. We took morningside up and started hiking out toward St. Pats. They took me into some sweet terrain and nice soft snow. I was amazed that there was soo much pow around after just a short hike. We did some laps here and hit a tight little gap booter. Wil was a great tour guide -- back in bounds we hit up the Dark Forest for some tree jib action. We decided to go try and find this boulder field that Chris and Wayne had spotted the previous day, along with a really nice open meadow filled with pow and aspen trees. This requires us to drop out of the resort through the backcountry access gate, not sure which one. We traversed a good distance and we were rewarded with super dry deep powder. I had no clue where we were but the shredding was awesome... Ended up stranded along a cliff band of around 30-60 foot, we couldn't get close enough to see over. This was the beginning of the trouble, no line down.. we were forced to boot pack back up the chute and into a band of trees. After an hour or two of slogging through rotten snow, we were able to hit the upper traverse line and head the opposite direction back to the resort... or so we thought. At least we were away from the cliff band and eminate doom, it was pretty scary scambling back up this face watching the sluff rush past into never never land. Farther down, Wil and I found some more sweet powder lines and we thought we were heading back near the resort. We ended up at Fish Creek Falls and had to hitch hike back into town then back to the resort. Good fun.