jp's blog

Photo: Alex M. Rider: Dave, JP Location: Sheep Creek - Loveland Pass
We find ourselves at Loveland Pass again bright and early Saturday. Mike and I did a few hitch hike laps and found some great snow in the less traveled areas. The main chutes on the pass and main bowls are very tracked out and very wind blown. The last storm looked like it erased a lot more of the snow base, as we saw tree stumps and rocks not seen since late Oct. We shuttled the good areas on the front side and later met up with Ffej, Mark and Mark from Keystone. We decided to take a hike out the east ridge around toward Arapahoe Basin and hit Dave's Wave. Dave's Wave is a sweet backcountry run with a rad over hanging cornice most of the way down. You can jump off the cornice multiple times and the terrain forms a real nice natural half pipe down to the trees. Once in the trees we were rewarded with completely untracked deep powder and a few nice cliff drops. Ffej airs first, me next, landing in his bomb hole I end up tomahawking after the landing. Sweet! We make it back down to the Arapahoe basin lot and start hitch hiking back up, at this point we run into DrrrtyD and Meisha.. we traverse out to the ironing board and find a nice hip style jump with great landing, we all start throwing front side 3's and even some cab 3's. After hanging out here for a while, we shuttle a few more laps with them and decide to head to the bar. The snow was OK, but lots of wind and sun has killed the deep soft powder conditions. Probably won't be riding until Jackson Hole, WY next week. I'll be back in 10 days or so.

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.

UPDATE 12/31/05: Ffej's extreme workout video posted, check it out. This is the video from the 5 car area a week or so ago. Deep snow on the pass and lots of having fun. This video is hilarious!

5 Car - Ffej's Extreme Workout - (right click - save as)5 Car - Ffej's Extreme Workout - (Mirror Link)
I met the vangina crew up at the Pass around 6:45am. After 20" over the previous two days conditions are deep. We waited for Mike and JJ to show up and started to shuttle the monster 4x4 van up the mountain. We hit some of the main chutes down from the summit and the pow was amazing and very untracked. Loveland Pass was closed during the storm so we pretty much had first dibs. We rode our favorite spots and decided to head over to the Gilbrater rock drop. Now this drop is the shit, a very large rock about 25 foot high sitting on the side of a really nice north facing chute with a great landing. From the top it feels like you are jumping off the end of the world, and with such a great landing and deep powder conditions you can go as big as you want. We all dropped it a few times and continued on with the day. The van crew had to take off around noon so I met up with Ffej, Jordan, Chris and Cash. We shuttled a few laps of powder and decided to head back over to the rock drop and have some fun. We each dropped it a bunch more times until we mashed out the landing. So much fun.