Backcountry Skiing..Your Winter Window Into The Chugach.
Short and long-term models and forecast discussions indicate rising temps and precipitation for the weekend. With a soft, unconsolidated, deep 300cm+ snowpack above 2700′ in Thompson Pass the avalanche hazard for most aspects and elevation will increase to CONSIDERABLE beginning Friday morning. Sloughing, point releases and “channeling” may be large as there is really no bed or weak layers, just […]
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Julie Brown (CA)
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Skied a variety of line on the North Shore of Big Odessey, except this one. Typically rock laden and rough, today it was stocked full of snow with hardly a stone. Some breeze textured powder with small, isolated patches of soft slab made for good, steep skiing. Some “ruts”. In the photo you can see where I descend then long […]
Read moreOne of joys and advantages with free-heel bindings is telemark skiing Thompson Pass powder. As skis have got fatter, alpine turns have been worked in to my skiing and so I like to mix it up. The “mono-mark” is a type of telemark turn that uses only one ski in the lead to make the turn. By gently rocking the […]
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SKI– VERY GOOD -Solo up Schoolbus via Telemark under flat light conditions finding good powder skiing when the sun popped out enough to ski it. I found 4-8″ of new snow over the nice old snow and spotty slabs we had previously. AVALANCHE – With the sun busting out a bit tomorrow and more on Thursday, a CONSIDERABLE avalanche hazards […]
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Glide cracks are not that common around Valdez compared to the Turnigan Pass recreational areas. The areas we recreate are mostly void of glide cracks, thus we don’t think of them as a daily hazard while backcountry skiing. Like cornices, they are largely unpredictable and thus require some respect and distance especially when naturally active. Glide cracks, at least from […]
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Skied with the Wilsons from Anchorage today and also met a another pair of “non-mechanized”, thus clean-powered for Chugach powder, ski alpinist all the way from Austria. They met us at the top of the icefall, then roped up and disappeared into the abyss of a crevassed Alaska glacier. The groups I met today have been here all week and have […]
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