By Francisco Tharp, on February 8th, 2010
 Monica, enjoying a beautiful, introspective tour. It’s mating season in the High Country: all around I see the blossoming of new, survive-the-cold-of-winter romances, as well as (in my case) the bidding adieu to love past and passed. The stakes are high and our hearts, like a sketchy Colorado snowpack, are a veritable battleground of subtle yet dynamic, and powerful yet mysterious energies.
Last week I went for a tour with my friend Monica, who was in town to take her Level I avalanche course. As usual, the chug-a-chug rhythm and aerobic endorphins of steep skinning induced a good, philosophical heart-to-heart chat: my recently lost relationship, her recently budding-but-complicated relationship, relationships past and what we learned, relationships yet to come and what we hope. We climbed fast and between rapid breaths we chopped out the big questions of our day: “Why…doesn’t…he…just…tell me…” and “Maybe…she…needs…more…stability…” Over water and snacks, we had more continuous conversation: “I’m just not sure where this leaves me…” and “What are you looking for?”
What, indeed?
 Second Bowl: The open face with the dispersed trees slid about 200 vertical feet below us as we stood on top. As Monica and I topped out on Snodgrass Mountain, we decided to refocus our energies and turn on our avalanche goggles. We headed for the east bowls which we anticipated would still be soft and have a few inches of fresh from the night before. We skied up to the top of the locally-dubbed Second Bowl (conveniently placed between First and Third bowls) and checked out the steep 38-40 degree entrance. We’d felt nothing but stable snow so far: fresh, soft powder on top of a firm midpack that was bonding well with January’s old snow. It would have been tempting to just jump right in, but the steepness of the pitch and the shrubby aspen trees poking out (good trigger points) raised my hackles a bit. We decided to dig a snow pit for assessment in a flat spot jammed tight between the roll over to the bowl’s headwall and the trees.
We looked at layers and performed some stability tests, and the snow seemed surprisingly stable. Pits can be notoriously misleading though, because of a concept called “spatial variability.” What a layman might translate to: “Dang snow ain’t the same ever-where.” Seems like a “duh!” right? Well, even a couple meters away snow and the stability of all its layers can be drastically different.
 Unfortunately, the light crapped out on us just as the snow slid, so the details are hard to see. That's the 65 cm crown face in the center, and my tracks to the tree that triggered the slide. Case in point: after refilling our pit, I post-holed about ten feet to our south to get a peek at the steep rollover of the bowl. I didn’t leave the flat top, but I still held onto a tree for security. I noticed that the snow suddenly changed. The top dozen centimeters were wet, and heavy – perfect for snowballs. I scooped some up, squeezed it, and threw it at the slope below – just a friendly “Take that, Mountain!” Then I got a bit stuck in my post hole, and asked Monica to come pull me up, which she did, and as we took a couple steps back towards our packs, we heard a soft humph…swooosh! The whole bowl, about 15 feet below us, was ripping out. We watched a huge powder cloud ride toward the valley and flow like a white river onto a flat, treed bench. That wet snow had gotten heavy enough through the day to slide on top of all the brushy willow trees which had weakened the snow pack below. Spatial variability.
Monica and I looked at each other wide-eyed and buzzed. “Can we just hug for a minute?” I asked her. “Yeah, let’s,” she said. We took a couple deep breaths, and then went and found some shadier, low-angle glades to ski on. The rest of the day we assessed why it wasn’t dumb luck that we hadn’t dropped in. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, but it still shook us up that we had even considered skiing that bowl. Hell hath no furry like siding snow and broken hearts.
We Midcountry residents tend to be a nomadic bunch, not only in place, but also in spirit (and maybe the two things are not so different). So, in one place (either physical, emotional or both) we find a deep, meaningful solid love connection. And yet, a mile or a month later, we are wallowing the sugary tree wells of love, face planting through sun crusts, watching our entire mountain crumble with destruction, and we yearn for the next fresh pow stash.
 Monica, enjoying the next fresh pow shot. We did end up getting some good, safe turns that day. A few days after skiing with Monica, I was chatting with yet another Midcountry friend about relationships: mine, his, the usual. “I find that I’m easy to love in Yosemite and Indian Creek,” he was saying to me. “And then there’s everyday life with me, when I’m in an office and I’m not at my happiest, and I get frustrated easily with things like slow computers. And then my partner starts wondering, ‘who is this person?’” And I knew exactly what he meant: Spatial variability.
I recently parted ways with a loved one, and I can’t help but feel like my instabilities (like changing towns and mountain ranges every four months and going incommunicado in the backcountry for weeks at a time) contributed to some fear about and distrust of our future. I can’t be sure – I find emotional cause-and-effect as nebulous as avalanche forecasting – but I wonder.
To Monica and all you other Midcountry Bumpkins post-holing around in love, we gotta hang in there. Got a Midcountry love story to share? Comment away. And remember: Be careful, because in the continental High Country, no matter how good things look, there’s almost always a weak layer deep, deep down. Depth hoar. Sad but true.
 Happy Valentine’s Day.
By Francisco Tharp, on January 31st, 2010
 Snow geekery at its finest. Note the shovel placement to keep those centigrade dial stem thermometers nice and accurate. Is that a 90-degree corner? Why yes it is. Thank you for noticing. I beat Level 2 of Avalanche Education last week. The end boss was real hard. I had to get all funky and whip out an up-down-left-left-A-B combo, front flip over the avalanche path of death, and then memorize about 12 gazillion codes and acronyms, BIWWWI (but it was well worth it). ILAT (I learned a ton). And I got to splurge on some new fancy, SST (snow study tools).
I couldn’t have asked for a better learning environment. In Crested Butte, the trailheads and field labs (a.k.a Sick gnar pow slopes) are only a 5-minute drive from the classroom. It’s the next best thing to a hut trip course. Plus, CB finally got a bunch of the white cold stuff that makes our world go round – that’s right, snow. Good old fashioned frozen water that falls from the sky. So we got to tromp around in the backcountry measuring the weather and digging snow pits while the second-largest slide cycle I’ve witnessed boomed, whumphed and rumbled all around us. And, since Colorado pretty much has the sketchiest snow pack this side of the Milky Way, we got to see plenty of scary layers in the snow.
Nor could I have gotten better teachers. Jayson Symons-Jones and Steve Banks, local AMGA-certified guides did a great job. Despite having traveled all over the world to places with simpler snow – Alaska, the Alps, etcetera – they haven’t forgotten how to read a sassy ol’ ready-to-beat-you-down Colorado snow pack. In fact, Jayson’s company, Crested Butte Mountain Guides, is the birth place of the American Institute for Avalanche Information and Education curriculum that has set the standard for avy ed in the U.S. (that’s the country below Canada, with the smaller mountains). Yet another reason to choose CB for avalanche ed.
 Jason Symons-Jones, Crested Butte Mountain Guides owner and lead guide, demonstrates a professional-grade hole in the snow.  When the skin track is this deep, you know you're in for the goods. And some avalanche potential. At times the walls were up to my ribs, and a kayak paddle would have been more helpful than poles. The upside to this new perspective I have on avalanche awareness is that I feel more confident interpreting our snowpack and making safe decisions in the backcountry. And, of course, we got to play with our beacons a little. To any snow geeks out there, I highly recommend it – way more in depth than the Level I. Level I classes seem generally aimed to teach you some rules of thumb, teach you how much you don’t know, and ultimately scare the fecal matter out of you. Level II focuses on when, how and why to bend the rules of thumb based on what’s actually happening in our snowpack. The course also establishes professional observation guidelines, so it’s a great choice for any outdoor professional working in the winter.
The downsside has been that I’m starting to drive my roommate nuts. I have a new 10x loupe that I use for looking at pretty snowflakes, but that’s not all I use it for. Here’s a typical morning exchange these days:
Me, hunched over a pile of dirty dishes at the sink: “Allen, would say these are decomposing BLPs or an SS lens?” I hand him the plate with a centigrade-graduated dial stem thermometer and loupe on it.
He groggily feels about for his coffee bag in the freezer for a moment before noticing me.
“What the…Are you high on Lucky Charms again?”
“You know, decomposing Baked Lasagna Particles, or a Spaghetti Sauce lens? I’m leaning toward the MLPs because the surface temperatures last week averaged in the high 50s, which is rare for our house, and leads me to believe the oven was on a lot because you were baking. Plus, I got a TT-E-SP in the top millimeter. What do you think? Actually, maybe I should take a T20 measurement just to be sure, and do a couple ECTs to see if we can get it to fracture.”
Let’s hear it from any of you snow geeks out there! Where does your obsession lead you? You can tell us in the comment form below.
 Would you call that R2-D2, or C3-PO? Maybe OB-1? The class stops to check out one of the many new snow avalanches we saw that week. Squint at the background for a while - it's there.
By Francisco Tharp, on January 25th, 2010
 Pow powty pow pow, eh. That's Canadian for "awesome skiing." Craggy St. Nicholas Peak looks on approvingly. First face shots. They’re an inaugural event that ranks right up there with the first night sleeping under the stars, first Brass Monkey, the losing of virginity, etcetera. My first face shots came in some glorious Cameron Pass powder – Montgomery Bowl, to be exact. I spent most of my youth snowboarding, so when I learned to Tele ski, snow in the face was quite novel.
 I got the skin track blues. En route to the Mt. Gordon summit. My friend Levi recently got his first (Cheers!). He drove 24 hours, toured for six days into the Canadian Rockies, and summited two peaks to get there, but get there he did, by god.
Levi and four mutual friends – Sam Riggs, Michelle Bodenhammer, Judith Robertson and Monica Reuning – recently completed the so-called Mini Wapta Traverse, a 16-mile round trip along the Wapta Ice Field in Banff National Park. The tour, with multiple day excursions including ascents of both Mt. Gordon (10,500 ft.) and Mt. Thompson (10,200 ft.), took them 8 days. The route is a shorter version of the Wapta Traverse, a major hot spot for Canadian ski mountaineering due to the relative safety of the route, and easy access to the route’s nearby peaks.
 Peyto Hut: somewhere between Arctic mobile home and Japanese Zen garden. Along the way the crew stayed in two huts, Peyto and Bow, which looked pretty foreign to a Colorado hut-tripper like me. “The Peyto Hut was definitely like a trailer,” Levi says. “It looks like someone dragged a little mobile home trailer up into the mountains.”
Levi, Michelle and Sam skied Mt. Thompson on day four out of the Peyto hut. “We made two unsuccessful attempts at another peak,” says Levi, “and then in an afternoon we skied Thompson. It was New Year’s Eve, so we were really feeling like we had something to celebrate up there on that mountain. Then we had a tremendous dinner in the hut – chicken pot pie, two appetizers, two desserts, whiskey and Bailey’s.”
On day 5 the group toured 4 miles to the Bow Hut, their second of the trip. “The Bow hut was a little more like a 10th Mtn. Division Hut,” Levi says. “You’ve got a wood stove, a common room, bunks, and such.” From Bow they made consecutive day trips up Mt. Gordon then along the Crow Foot Route, which includes descending then re-ascending a 35-degree couloir.
The group definitely got another classic Wapta experience: whiteout blizzard navigation. “It wasn’t much of an issue,” Levi says, “but it brought challenges. Especially skiing downhill – you didn’t know how steep of a slope you were on.”
 Hmmm...shall we take the fast way down, or go back the way we came? On the Summit of Mt. Thompson. Despite ticking off tall mountains, and traversing glaciers with deep gaping, blue tears, Levi’s highlight was a simpler experience – one that can be found pretty close to home.
“After skiing Mt. Gordon we were skiing the slopes above the Bow hut, and we were actually on the glacier,” he recalls. “The snow was so good. We just kept getting free refills from the wind and new fallen snow. It was just fantastic powder skiing – my first face shots ever. It was also a relief to have skied Gordon because it was our one objective of the trip. We made it on our first try, and we made it as a group, all together.”
Levi is one of my heros these days. He trades 30 hours of work per month for rent in Leadville. He ski tours by day, and he watches Kung-Fu movies by night. He is a self-proclaimed unemployed backcountry ski bum, and that’s the way he likes it. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t wear an avalanche transceiver. Oh no, avalanches wear a Levi Burford transceiver. Recently Levi surfed my couch while we took a Level II Avalanche class in Crested Butte, and as he unloaded a huge Tupperware bin of dehydrated food he scavenged from Outward Bound course leftovers he said, “Man, I can probably stay unemployed until after February with all this food!”
Good luck with the unemployment, Levi, and stay above the snow. I look forward to more of your tales from the Midcountry.
Anyone else out there got a tale from their own personal Midcountry? Let’s hear it!
By Francisco Tharp, on January 18th, 2010
 Kick skins: the most useful handful of gear since GORP. These BCA Skin scraps I use weigh in at 65g, including the tip clip. Add a hyper light stuff sack and total weight is 77g. Unless you’re skiing the Red Lady, just about every backcountry ski tour in Crested Butte requires a fairly flat valley approach of 1 to 3 miles. The tried and true method for these laborious tours is to slog in and slog out with big fatty skins on those big fatty skis that are so much fun in powder. I’ve tried other methods, too. One day I skied home from Snodgrass with one skin on, one skin off, like some kind of seizing, lurching skateboarder. Granted, I made it back to the car before my ski partners, but when I got there I was so off balance I could only walk in counter-clockwise circles for a good four minutes. I’ve also tried kick wax, but that stuff’s too gunky; if you use it before the climb it’ll mank up your skins and then kill your downhill buzz.
Enter kick skins. In a nut shell, kick skins kick ass. I learned about them from all the ski gurus in Crested Butte: those folks who routinely ski over to Aspen for a latte in the morning and make it back in time for the Teocalli Bowl rope drop; those folks who glide past Chuck Norris on the Nordic trails and drop pointers on his technique.
Kick skins are like the thong of climbing skins: sleek, slender and sassy. They are essentially super thin skins that cover just enough of your base to give a little kick, and still allow for a substantial glide.
 Key ring tip clip for the Nordic skis. Note the duct tape reinforcement: uber importante. I like to use the scraps from when I trim my fat skins. That way I don’t spend as much money and I throw less away. “A skin saved is a skin earned,” George Washington once told his father as he chopped down a pesky apple tree.
Then, I scavenge some kind of tip loop set up. For my Nordic skis (Tempo classic skis that are older than I am) a key ring works well. Those are cheap at any thrift shop of hardware store. For my telemark skis (Black Diamond Nunyos and BD Kilowatts) I use standard skin loops. I regularly find these cheap at used gear shops, or from friends getting rid of old, goobery skins. I just run about 1.5 inches of the skin tip through the tip loop, fold the skin back on itself, and secure with a couple wraps of duct tape. I don’t bother with tail clips or fixtures: remember, we’re aiming for glide here.
 Fat tip clips for my tele skis. Again, gotta use the duct tape 'cause the skin's so skinny. I use 18mm skins on my Nunyos (105-73-93mm wide) and my BD Kilowatts (125/95/112 mm wide) – not because this is some sort of magic ratio, but because that’s how wide my skin scraps ended up being. I use 25mm skins on my 50mm Nordic skis because I only carry one set of skins Nordic skiing, and I might need them to actually climb some hills, while on my tele skis, I’ll have fat skins for any serious climbing. Another trick: I carry two kick skins and one full width skin for my Nordic skis. If I really need to climb, I can put both kick skins on one ski, and the fatty on the other.
 Right down the middle = more kick, better climbing, less thinking. Now, there’s a couple ways I’ve used kick skins. There’s the good old fashioned missionary positioning, where you just run the skin down the middle of the ski. Or, for those who like to live on the edge, you can run the skin along the outer edges.
Missionary’s good for greater kick, steeper climbing and more mindless plodding. The edge method requires slightly more technique, but can pay off with speed and longevity: it allows some skating, and if you weight your outside edge on the kicks and your inside edge on the glides, you’ll be cruising. This can feel awkward at first, but which great things in life don’t?
Despite all their newfound fame and glory, kick skins also have some drawbacks, limitations, and special considerations. First, they add weight to your pack. If you’re going to be doing any substantial climbing, you’ll have to carry both kick skins and fat skins.
 Outside edge placement = skating options, and greater kick and glide potential with proper technique. I found my kickers to lose traction once the slope got to be above 15 degrees, or so, but this will depend on your skin-to-ski width ratios. Second, you’ll probably want a little stuff sack to keep them dry and clean. Kickers are skinny and lack tail clips, so any loss of stickiness is a bummer. A little dog hair on a full skin might not matter much, but on a kick skin it could neutralize a high percentage of your adhesive.
If any of you readers have used kick skins and would like to share any beta or experiences, feel free to use the comment form below. I’d love to hear about it!
Kick on dudes and dudettes.
By Francisco Tharp, on January 11th, 2010
 Steve Jay worry free with 30 inches of fresh below him. Scary avalanche conditions can also mean great skiing in the trees below Tagert Hut. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. - Evan Hardin
Two years ago, the alpine bowls and tributary valleys of Castle Creek conspired with snow and gravity in a failed attempt to assassinate me and 10 of my good friends. I don’t blame them. The laws of physics are ruthless mercenaries, and we made ourselves easy targets by skiing through some catastrophic avalanche paths on the tail end of an enormous snow cycle (40+ inches in three days). My ski partners and I learned a lot that day. We analyzed the trip in and out. Still to this day I wonder about the decisions we made. Mountain guru Lou Dawson even chimed in on the discussion.
We did a lot of things wrong that day, and we did a lot of things right. But mostly we just got lucky. Really f’ing lucky.
Last week I skinned back up Castle Creek with many of the same friends for the first time since the scrape. Last time I was skiing that trail visibility was about 100 meters. On this trip, however, clear, sunny weather opened up visibility to all of the starting zones that nearly ended us. We skied one at a time across the path where, two years ago, I fell into a bottomless willow well with a heavy pack on. I was lucky that one of my ski partners skied by and yanked me out 5 minutes before the hugest avalanche I’d ever seen, heard and felt wiped out an entire pond. That white death extended the existing slide path up onto the facing side of the valley, and settled brick-hard because of the water from the pond.
As we stopped in the trees for lunch and a morning PBR, I gazed ahead at another nightmare memory. “Hey Marco,” I said between bites. “Remember that last trip when that powder blast came roaring out of the clouds just as you were skiing into the trees?”
 Crossing another big one. “Yeah,” he said. “I yelled, ‘Avy! Avy!’ and we all started booking it downhill, and it was a good three or four minutes before we could see the person in front of us again.” It was hard to reconcile that reality with the blissfully calm blue bird day we were enjoying.
 Yet another lap on the seemingly endless pillow lines in 2008. Trees below Tagert Hut. Once at the huts we settled in for the weekend. We started a fire, filled the melt water pot with (hopefully) clean snow, rigged up some zip-line wine bags, and packed our day packs to go skiing. Just a quick dusk lap before dinner.
Fifteen dudes showed up (some at 2 a.m. thanks to a broken snowmobile clutch). Most of us are friends from high school with some college buddies mixed in, too, and the hut trip has become an annual ritual. It is the only time many of us see each other. That night we reveled and told stories, many of which were about the trip two years ago we had dubbed the “We’re Still Alive Hut Trip of 2008.”
“Oh man, remember skiing over that avalanche debris, and just like, not knowing if someone was under there, and then getting a call on the radio being like, ‘whew! No one’s down there.’”
 Home sweet home...for a few days anyway. “Dude, how about night before? The whole hut was shaking from all the slides in Pear Basin. And then that morning debris was across our tracks. Man, we were lucky.”
“So lucky.”
The next day we skied. Our first lap was the best of my season so far: about 1,000 feet of 30 to 35-degree east-facing, waist-deep pow. I felt really safe about our first lap, but as we approached our second I started to feel more uneasy. As we traversed some low-angle gullies that matched the aspect of the pitch we intended to ski, I noticed harder, more slabby snow. Not hollow sounding or feeling, but definitely slabby. The pitch we meant to ski looked full of shark fin rocks that I feared could zipper a slab loose, and a steep convexity added to my worry. As we strapped in to drop in, my intuition flared up. “Guys, I’m not dropping here,” I said. “I just don’t feel good about it.” Trusting that intuition is definitely one piece of learning I carried away from the “We’re Still Alive Trip.”
 Skinning off into the sunset. I skied back to the hut with one other partner along our skin track, while the others skied that worrisome pitch. I lost visual contact with them for a couple minutes, and by the time I came around the basin, they were all at the bottom, covered in powder, and putting skins back on. I skied a lower angle pitch down to them and we all skied home together for another great night of fun. No hard feelings, just different risk assessments.
Any close calls I’ve had in the mountains – which, thankfully, have been few and far between – leave me in a sort of hypothetical grieving process. Grief for what could have happened. Guilt for what could have happened. Horror at what could have happened. Occasionally I still beat myself up about our close call in Castle Creek. But returning to that valley with those friends, building our shared narrative of the experience, and putting to use some of the lessons I learned have all been a step toward moving on. I’m sure more will come.
 To the laws of physics, those almighty Gods of mountain mayhem.
By Francisco Tharp, on January 4th, 2010
 2010, off to a beautiful start. In years past I’ve always brought in the new year front country style: cheap Champaign, mediocre DJ music, annoying noise makers that spring out then curl up like cowards, kisses with strangers; you know, the usual arsenal. During those front country celebrations I’ve attended, New Year’s feels like a tangible, concrete thing. As the moment nears, the countdown begins and the euphoria of the masses builds higher and higher. The cheering and joy that erupts as the clock strikes 12 marks a distinct line between this year and last.
This year, because of the blue moon rising on 2010, I celebrated backcountry style with a midnight ski toward the ghost town of Gothic, north of Crested Butte. And in those wilder lands with fewer souls, I found midnight to be a more subtle experience – an event akin to a branch bending in the wind, or snow squeaking beneath a well-waxed ski.
Around 7 o’clock on New Year’s Eve my girlfriend, Reed, and I carbo loaded some spaghetti and elk sausage for the big ski. For desert, a snifter of Poor Man’s Bailey’s. Our circadian rhythms insisted it was bed time, but AC/DC’s face-melting guitar solos blaring on the local radio station, KBUT, meant one thing and one thing only: time to celebrate. So we layered up and headed out into the night.
We drove through town around 10:00. Christmas lights framed store fronts, and mobs of tourists and locals alike strolled boisterously down the icy sidewalks: some hurried to their $100 all-inclusive events, while others stumbled toward the nearest drinking establishment with the heater on and no cover charge. Even the trailhead was bustling. As I strapped on my Nordic skis for the season’s first ride, I counted the cars of dozens of like-minded folks.
The round, silver moon was already high above Crested Butte Mountain when we took off, chasing our moon shadows down the trail. The cold, moon-blue snow was fast, and I was enjoying that rare experience of having chosen the perfect kick wax: kick and glide, kick and glide. A mile in we had to stop to put on moon screen and moon glasses (nothing worse than a moon burn, or moon blindness). Around 11:30 we paused to sip some hot chocolate and Irish cream. When we stilled our rustling clothes and squeaking bindings, space and silence and light rushed out of the land.
 No wonder they call it a blue moon. We skied on, sometimes chatting about this and that, sometimes swishing along without a word. In a grove of aspens, Reed stopped, took out her cell phone, and smiled. She snapped the phone closed and put it back in her pocket. “Happy New Year!” she said. We shuffled our skis parallel for our first kiss of the decade. It was 12:11 a.m., and as I hugged Reed, I looked around at the snowy hills, the fox and deer tracks splitting the bright, silvery fields and the silhouetted aspen branches above. Somewhere in the valley the snowpack settled with a low, echoing growl. After reveling in the moment, we continued on home.
“I love how anticlimactic New Year’s is out here,” I said, breaking a quarter mile of quiet.
“Yeah,” said Reed between short breaths that hung frozen in the air. “Just another moment in another trip around the sun.”
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Francisco Tharp
Crested Butte, Colorado
Francisco Tharp is a nomadic freelance writer and Outward Bound instructor based in Colorado. A native to the state, he's been accused of "Coloradocentrism," but isn't afraid to go exploring wherever the mountain muse may lead.
His most recent expediiton was a 35-day traverse in Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska. His journalism, nonfiction and poetry has appeared in High Country News, Mountain Gazette, Silk Road and Rocky Mountain Collegian.
Francisco would be happy to hear from you at franciscotharp@gmail.com.
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