As the snow was flying in Central Oregon last week, it was time to dust off the snow gear and go play. Last Tuesday ended up being an epic day at the resort at Mt Bachelor. There was a ton of fresh snow and the conditions were as good as I have ridden in years!
Fast forward 1 day and I decided to take the splitboard up to Tumalo and see how the hill was for backcountry. There was not a lot of visibility and given the amount of snow the area received over the past several days, I decided it would be prudent to stay off the ridge/bowl area that must just continue to be loading up for avie at some point.
The wifer and I skinned up and I kept thinking to myself that there was a lot of snow and debating the sanity of skinning up and possibly having to ski/skin down due to the amount of snow. The skin up was beautiful as the snow caked the trees and the wind blown nature of the trees towards the ridge made for some beautiful scenery:
We finally peaked and we changed over into ski/ride mode. Sure enough I made it down the first couple of minor slopes and then got stuck in the above knee high snow....The slope was not steep enough to keep any momentum and my snowboard would just sink into the snow.
I resorted to going back into tour mode and put the skins back on....the skins lasted about 15 minutes until they lost their 'stick' thanks to the snow. I was now in 'ski' mode on my splittie and I had visions of yard saling down the mountain since ski mode is anything but 'secure'. This time, the snow depth worked in my favor and the above knee deep snow kept me from gaining much momentum at all. When I switched back into ski mode, I was post-holing above my waste so walking out was not really a good option...fortunately ski mode for the splittie seemed to work well.
Fast forward 1 day and I decided to take the splitboard up to Tumalo and see how the hill was for backcountry. There was not a lot of visibility and given the amount of snow the area received over the past several days, I decided it would be prudent to stay off the ridge/bowl area that must just continue to be loading up for avie at some point.
The wifer and I skinned up and I kept thinking to myself that there was a lot of snow and debating the sanity of skinning up and possibly having to ski/skin down due to the amount of snow. The skin up was beautiful as the snow caked the trees and the wind blown nature of the trees towards the ridge made for some beautiful scenery:
We finally peaked and we changed over into ski/ride mode. Sure enough I made it down the first couple of minor slopes and then got stuck in the above knee high snow....The slope was not steep enough to keep any momentum and my snowboard would just sink into the snow.
I resorted to going back into tour mode and put the skins back on....the skins lasted about 15 minutes until they lost their 'stick' thanks to the snow. I was now in 'ski' mode on my splittie and I had visions of yard saling down the mountain since ski mode is anything but 'secure'. This time, the snow depth worked in my favor and the above knee deep snow kept me from gaining much momentum at all. When I switched back into ski mode, I was post-holing above my waste so walking out was not really a good option...fortunately ski mode for the splittie seemed to work well.
No comments:
Post a Comment