Northern Colorado Storm Chasing

The goods keep coming and the pow skiing keeps getting better and better. This weekend Mark, Dave, Frank, and myself set out on a powder frenzy road trip to the upper reaches of northern Colorado. After several hours of driving through heavy snow we arrived to our destination with a good 3′ of windless, light, dry, fluffy pow just waiting to be slayed. The powder gods have been treating us well this winter as 2 of my top 3 powder days ever have occurred just in the past month.

We arrived at the hotel, checked out the weather sites, Snotel, and some topo maps and then called it a night. We had a big day ahead of us and we needed all the rest we could get. Saturday was the ‘work day’ where we would be breaking miles of trail with the sled and then some distance on the skintrack. We didn’t have high hopes for making too many laps as most of the day would be putting a road in and laying down a deep skintrack.

Frank and Dave at the hotel checking the weather:

It had snowed every day of the week leading up to our trip with additional snow forecasted for the entire weekend. Our worries weren’t that of there not being enough snow, but there being TOO much snow! Would we even be able to get the sled up the road? Only time and effort would tell.

Waxing the boards before bed:

We got an early start the next morning and hit the trail by sunrise. The sled ride up was one continuous faceshot. I had to have Dave stop the sled every couple of minutes because the snow was going up my nose, down the throat, etc. We blazed the widetrack through a solid 3.5′ of super light fluff to the start of where we needed to skin.

The road to Trenchtown:

Early morning light creeping up:

The only time we saw the sun was early on both mornings. The rest of the time it was snowing at a pretty decent clip.

The crew getting ready for skinning:

I began breaking trail through the ultra deep snow and don’t think I’ve ever been high thigh deep in a skintrack. Luckily we didn’t have a whole lot of elevation to gain to reach our zone for the day.

The crew on the skintrack in:

We spent all morning sledding in and skinning in to our zone. All of the hard work paid off shortly after turn #1:

Mark in the white room:

This zone is about as close as you can get to yo-yo lap perfection.
*1,000′ consistent moderate pitch
*Nicely spaced Aspen trees
*Sheltered from wind
*fun roller pillows
*scattered cliff drops

We managed to get in 4 laps on day 1. Not too bad considering all the trail breaking we did earlier in the day.

More pow goodness:

Day two actually got better. Sun in the morning on the way in: