Colorado Backcountry: Steamboat Springs
Check out Wil’s post @ 120 Days of Powder: Day 52: Lost…
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.
February 26th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Gotta take the Garmin with on these kind of adventures. I use the crap out of mine when I go Jeeping, but don’t do enough back country to tote it with most times. The topo pack for it is awesome though when needed.
February 27th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Stoermer - Nice TR. I know the cliff you got stuck at - we went through there 2 weekends ago skiers left of the cliff band. Thigh deep goodness. Luckily we went with a local and he showed us the traverse/hike to get back to the resort and avoid ending up at the Falls.
Will
February 27th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
hah! we missed the traverse skiers left of the cliff band and tried to make it down the band. it was gnarly for a while and we decided to hike back up to the upper traverse.. missed the cat walk. hahah anyways, it was a fun slog… good lesson learn is always be prepared. wish i had the GPS
February 28th, 2006 at 10:30 am
It was a pretty nutty time… I can’t believe we ended up at the falls!
February 28th, 2006 at 10:34 am
LOL, your comment system doesn’t like me… sorry for the double.
March 1st, 2006 at 11:22 am
The video footage from this is now up on my site…
March 1st, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Quicktime version should be done uploading in like 3 minutes…
On the first try after talking to you it was at like 200 Meg… I worked it down to 77 meg (twice as large as the flash vid, but the quality is easily two times better.) I’ll keep working on it, eventually I’m sure I’ll get a good formula.
Like I mention on the site, it’s worth the d/l if you’re in it… otherwise, probably not.
March 2nd, 2006 at 8:06 am
guess i dont know what i’m talking about.. i’ll find you some good export settings. check snowfilmer.com too
and yea vid is tight.. nice
March 2nd, 2006 at 9:23 am
lol, the settings are probably a bit different for the different platforms though, but I’ll get it down.
March 2nd, 2006 at 7:40 pm
yeah i’ve been using FCP a lot lately cause my only >500mhz processor is a g4 powerbook. i need a new computer, i’m seriously using a dell 500mhz tunning linux. hah
March 13th, 2006 at 9:10 am
A little info for those that don’t know the canyon: If you look across to the north side look for a bulls eye of aspen trees (it is obvious when you see it). If you are down canyon of it, you are safe and out of the cliff zone. Above it…you really need to know where the lines are. Fish Creek Canyon holds the goods but everyone that plays there has likely been cliffed out at some point.