Backcountry Splitboarding: Brown Mtn

As Friday wrapped up, it was time to get packed and start the trek down south to Cabana Hodgie for a weekend of backcountry fun.  The plan was to hit Brown mountain on Saturday and then head up to Crater Lake on Sunday.

The drive down 97 towards Chiloquin was fairly non-eventful until Chemult where the roads got to be a snowy/icy combo and there were several cars off the side of the road in snow banks.  I proceeded with caution as the cabin was close and there was no rush....

It was great to see familiar faces again at the cabin and we made a subconscious collective decision  that we apparently had  a few too many brain cells and therefore the only proper thing to do was to proceed to kill off a few....we polished of a growler that I picked up at Empire Car wash...yes, there is a growler filling station at a car wash in town (blog post to follow at some point).  The nectar of choice was the Ninkasi Tricerahops Double IPA.  With a 8.8% alkie content, it started the evening off in fine fashion.  Fast forward a few hrs and we had managed to empty a couple more bottles of wine.

Fast forward to the a.m. when we started to doubt our prior evening's strategy on liquid carbo loading for a long day in the backcountry.  Josh showed up on Saturday morning and was less than impressed with how we looked...which was probably better than how we felt.

We loaded up and headed up to Brown Mtn.  The mountain was covered by a fog/cloud combo and we started the skin up...It was slow going as we were breaking trail along the way.  There was about 5-8 inches of snow to pack as we skinned in.  The prior evening's dehydration strategy and the hard effort of skinning & sweating proved to be a challenge.

For some reason the skin up seemed to take much longer than the last time...we gained about 2,000 ft and as a formality we skinned to the 'summit'.
Josh/Bob:

The summit views were about the same as our skin on the way up...foggy and cloudy.
Da' boys on the way to the summit:

We converted from tour to ride mode and it was time to enjoy some backcountry powda'!  The descent was amazing and our concerns of heavy snow were laid to rest as we floated and carved our way down Brown.  The last 1/3 of the mountain was a little trickier as it was a game of maintaining momentum as the angle eased up.  We got back on our skin tracks as close as we could for the last little push as the packed down trail helped to maintain a little speed.

One of the gentler slopes you had to maintain speed on:

Suffice it to say that there was still a fair amount of hopping forward on the board, snow grabbing to push along, post-holing, skinning, and even a little skiing to get back through that last push.  I got to the car and surmised that whatever mode I was in (and there were several change-overs from tour to ride to tour to ride to postholing to falling and feeling like a turtle on its back), it was the wrong mode!

It was a superb descent.  The snow conditions were just about perfect.  It would have been nice if the fog/cloud combo had lifted but we still had an amazing day.  It was now time to head back towards Chiloquin and find a greasy establishment to replenish some calories and hydrate.  A fine day indeed.....

Josh on the descent:

 Hodgie getting his flow on: