East Ridge

Here's a couple of pictures of what I skied on St. Paddy's day besides some beer laps at Alta.   A couple of boyz have blogged this so its pretty much a trade route, it was a great corn run.

Santaquin Peak

Santaquin Peak viewed from the fine community of Woodland hills.

The long approach up sunburn ridge to Santaquin's summit.

Some nice eye candy behind Santaquin peak.

Emilie and I on the summit looking north towards Provo, not realizing how sunburned we were getting.

Emilie dropping in from the summit, the conditions blew us away for a major wind event a couple of days early the recrystallized powered felt like it didn't get a lick of wind.

Myself enjoying some nice powder turns on a really warm day, Santaquin was a long slog but the conditions were stellar.  All in all the peak tops out around 10,500 and we started around 6,000 and skied fine northern facing powder shots all the way down to the car.  Just another day of skiing powder in the Wasatch with no one else around.  Here is video Em took of me hugging the shade line on one of the many pitch's we milked.

Bro Straps Bowls

What's better than beginning a ski tour behind a Mormon temple?

Knowing that you are going to out boy GOSB for a bro-rific line.
Mountain guide Todd Glew uses his magic to find the Sawmill trail, a steep hiking trail that gains 2000 ft. in a mile. This trail turns right off the main trail before you go down into Big WIllow Canyon. The trail is marked relatively well by clearings and red tags and a hugh sign that says SawMill trail.
This Urban line has some serious vertical relief. Another sunny day in Sandy, Ut. The cameras were out as the people of Sandy got to see the boyz ski a stadium shot.
Lookers left titty. We felt like old men skiing just the Aprons of these bowls, but the snow higher getting to Lone Peaks ridge was lean and mean. The bowls were filled with for us to rip.
The nipples were full of cream for the boyz the play with.
Todd wiggling through the cleavage. We skied left titty, the cleavage and right titty all afternoon.
We talked about summitting Lone Peak, but conditions up high discouraged us. At the far left side of Big Willow Canyon we snuck down a chute and got into Bells Canyon. The Wasatch range looked big today.
Todd, the lone goat and a long way down Bells. We skied powder up high and the hiking trail to the reservoir pretty quickly.
A 12 hour ski tour tour day, lets go see some strippers. I'm all warmed up from those delicious boobs!

O' Sullivan and Dromedary on St. Patty's Day

The objectives Dromedary on the left and O'Sullivan on the right
at the top of Broads Fork. The optimistic plan was to ski from the summit of both peaks on this fine St. Patricks Day.

The lads for the task, Big Beard Ruthless out of hibernation, Adam "my knee hurts, take easy today." Lawton.

Adam bad knee Lawton putting in the whole bootpack up the O' Sullivan Couloir

Ruthless showing is colors, and meeting his quota for bringing beer on any and every adventure, on the summit of O' Sullivan Peak on St. Patty's Day

Looking down between the tips at the O'Sullivan north chute after skiing down from the summit via the east ridge.

Ruthless dropping the knee on O' Sullivan punchy but fine powder conditions.

Booting up the east face of Dromedary wasn't easy and involved some rock scree scrambling.

Adam traversing from the summit of Dromedary to the "way in to the way in"

Psyched to bag both Dromedary and O' Sullivan in winter.

Adam dropping the knee down the hanging snowfield off Dromedary heading for the Drome ribbon.

Adam traversing the ribbon of snow connecting the hanging snowfield, and the couloir.

The exposure of the left slanting ramp reminded of the ribbon on devils castle except it headed left, and was a lot shorter, breath step, breath step.

Adam enjoying the fruits of his nerve testing side step-athon.

The boys feeling lucky after plucking a tense line.

Harp on St. Patty's Day

What better way to celebrate my 10 year anniversary of getting buried in Suicide (remember that day Eric) than sending a face solo. It was a quick 1,900 vertical. The tracks I skied next were mine and Hugh's from yesterday.

P.S. At the top I found out the batteries in the camera were dead so I swapped them with the ones in the beacon.

P.P.S. Congrats to the Man Cross for crushing K-Wood.

- Roger Thornhill

Northwest of Twins and back up the Stairs

Last Friday I headed up to Broads Fork to go ski the northwest couloir of the East Twin.  My partner was my friend Josh Moran who grew up in Massachusetts with me on the same street(East Road).  He moved out here this season because he wanted to get a 400 trace year.  Although the southwest bowl hangs over Sandy tempting any suburbanite to ski it. The northerly aspects were staying fresh that week.  We rose early to give ourselves a fair chance at skinning out the southwest ramp back into Broads.

Beautiful, Beautiful Broads Fork.  This drainage holds many options for the backcountry skier.

The ridge that I hadn't climbed in a while. It was just as spicy as I remember.

The line, amazing walls, nice funnel, but was the powder good?

  Umm yes it was nice, very nice.  That's Josh dropping into the top funnel.  The snow was darn good skiing not even wind affected or touched by any other dairy farmer skiers yet that day.

After the turns in the chute were just as soft, Josh was willing to admit that a 300 trace year wasn't that bad.

After skiing the Northwest our options were limited, bushwhack down the canyon, skin the ramp back out towards Broads East facing slopes.  The snow was getting heavy on the south facing slopes and there were already evidence of wet slides all around us.  The east face was getting fried and it had slid the day before.  We made a call to do a quick tension traverse, and a hasty but anxiety causing bootpack.  We took Stefan's secret chute towards the west and ascended a ridge to climb back up the Stairs.

Looking into Stairs Gulch from where we dropped in, not from the top.  There were old crowns and avalanche debris in the Gulch.  We also saw another group of skiers sampling some of the powder on the northwest slope of the twins, they were half lapping on a big mountain.

  The powder up in the top of stairs was good, bottom avalanche debris.  It's one of those lines that actually makes you feel like you turned more than you hiked.  It took a while to get down the chute.  I never liked hanging out in there so we kept moving on the roller balls.

We had to do a stream crossing down by climbing crags but still managed several more turns after that.  It was a good link up, and catching the northwest in such good conditions was epic.

Mid March Update

The snow has been great up here. The days are long and we've had quite a stretch of bluebird powder days. We're even starting to develop a slight sun crust on South facing slopes. Friday I had a short day of work and headed South to Turnagain along with the rest of Anchorage. I went up the standard Sunburst route and found a nice 1,400' line.

There were quite a few folks out, so I decided to go deeper. I put my back to the road and started skinning towards Taylor Pass and on to Superbowl Peak. My geography was a bit off and I found myself on Goldpan Peak. After a short trascent/down climb, the alpenglow was in full effect and Superbowl was laid out below my tips

Sussing the Big Chief in the Turnagain Area

Bass had skied 12,000' vert on Friday and Tom was working on his rig, so Saturday would be my 4th solo tour in 4 days. Vista Peak has been a shot that I had been saving for a day like this. Big approach and highly visible from the highway. I drove to Eagle River and headed up Eagle River Road and turned left onto Mile-Hi Drive. After about a half dozen switchbacks, I parked and threw on the skins. My cankle howled in protest. I gained Mile-Hi pass and dropped into the next drainage and on to a trail put in by some Nordic skiers. Maybe the approach won't be too bad. Wrong, turns out team Nordic wasn't very motivated. I finially gained the ridge got up high enough to scope out the line.

Vista Peak

I dug a pit and it was garbage: CT 0, 4, and 11. Probably shouldn't be soloing it anyway. I found some mellow NW aspects and lapped it up before heading North for the game night in Wasilla. Despite my rampart cheating, I got crushed at Uno. The beer helped me through the devistating losses.

The next morning, Tom and I headed to Government Peak in the Talkeetna Mountains. We parked at the Marmot Trailhead, crossed the street, bridged the creak, and sent the ridge. The sun was in and out all day. During a sucker-hole, we decided for a quick diversion in the sun.

The Diversion

The ridge got a bit more challenging but we summitted quickly.

We decided to ski down a different drainage from the ascent to maximize vertical. The top was variable but eventually gave way to miles of shin deep powder. Ain't too proud for the low angle love.

-Marcello

Northwest to the Coalpit

A few hours before team shit show made it to the NW couloir of the Phiefferhorn a band of skier boyz made thier way up to the 5th highest peak in the Wasatch as well. This group of five made their way to the iconic peak in the early dawn hours, hitting the summit at 9:00am. With it all said, it is pretty amazing to think that two separate parties- for a grand total of 9 skier boyz in one day skied the Phieff. I'm sure Creepy Clay would be proud to know that so many of us frequent his favorite Wasatch classic. While setting up the anchor for the rappel I had to remind myself to start paying attention and stop thinking about the fact that this very line is the reason two boys were once ousted from the organization.


The reason for our early start was not because we had to go to work or wanted to watch tv after touring. It was because we had plans to continue on with a link up to the Coalpit Headwall. Both Slody and I were quite nostalgic about the first time we skied the Coalpit together with Uncle Keith back in the early days of the organization. We made the group decision that heading up the Hypodermic Needle apron and booting the exposed ramp was our best bet and estimated that it would take us about two hours to gain the Coalpit Headwall by these means. Little did we know that we were embarking on the skinner from hell, followed by a bootpack as annoying as a Forest Service Sheriff. The East facing apron skinner was on a breakable crust with little to no traction. I was surprised that Gramps did not suffer any Gramp outs. After we slowly made our way up the breakable crust skinner we switched over to bootpacking to take the ramp over to the Coalpit.

The Coalpit had the least snow in it any of us had seen. The conditions were chalky and variable, however it is always amazing to be on a run as large and powerful as the Coalpit Headwall. After skiing the headwall we found some great powder shots in the lower portions of the run. I had the opportunity to make my first decent telemark turns in the trees. Slody and I made an effort to try to figure out how to do a future link up between the Coalpit and the Y couloir. It will be great to see which skier boy puts together that link up in the future.

The gully skiing in the lower reaches of Coalpit gulch was amazing. When we reached the waterfall obstacle at the bottom of the gully Jay opted to ski it rather than rappel it and we all followed his line down. Fun skiing on waterfall that was falling apart. All and all, this was an amazing link up and another day in the long string of descents durting what some call the worst season ever- and the Skier Boyz call a season of great fun. Glad to be part of an organization that sees the glass half full and not half empty- unless the president asks you to knock the glass out of his hand- AML