For the last two weeks, our house has been full of family. Jen’s crew came for Christmas, and then my brother and his boys showed up for new years. As a result, we’ve been sticking around the house for the most part, but when it snowed 20 inches overnight, I couldn’t sit still anymore. My little brother and I grew up skiing and snowboarding at the not-so-massive Mt Spokane. It rained as much as it snowed, and “powder” was what we called any thing that wasn’t rime ice on the wind-blown summit. But season passes were $100, so you can’t really complain too much.
John, like me, isn’t the biggest fan of crowds, so he’s been talking about backcountry skiing for a while now. I figured that the big dump of the good stuff was just the right time to take him out for a tour, so I borrowed a board from a friend. We did some beacon practice in the front yard and set the alarm for early the next morning. I wanted to give him the real-deal experience—wide-open slopes of untracked powder with big peaks in the background. I should have just headed up to Mill D when Little Cottonwood was closed for control work, but I was too stubborn and we sat in traffic for an hour and a half to get the dozen blocks from the driveway to the entrance of LCC.
With no tracks at our chosen trail head, I broke an unfortunately steep skin track for a couple thousand feet while John stripped layers behind me until he had two jackets tied around his waist and was still covered with sweat. Despite being pretty crushed by the approach, John nailed every switchback and dropped into the waist-deep snow at the ridge to switch over his borrowed board. It was about then that he first noticed the advantage of skis over boards in the backcountry.
We dropped into the best snow of the year. And for a thousand feet and change, John knew what it was like to ride with weightless powder blowing over the top of his head. Unfortunately, the storm visibility led me to bring us down farther than I should have before traversing to the right, and I got us sucked into a very low-angle section only a few hundred yards from the truck. With skis, I just side stepped a couple times and cruised on through. On a board, John was pretty much screwed, and he spent the next half hour making as much progress as he did in the previous 30 seconds. Arriving at the truck, John hadn’t decided against the backcountry, but he did state flatly that the next time it would be on skis and not a splitboard. Yup..
