2 Dudes, 3 Days, 4 Couloirs, One Sweet Trip Into the Wind Rivers

Plan A:

The plan went like this, more or less:

• Meet at the Trail Lake Trailhead on Friday evening, go over gear and food, sleep there.
• Wake up early Saturday morning and hike up and over Burro Flats, descend to Dinwoody Creek, and follow the Gracier Trail to the toe of the Gannett Glacier.
• Climb and ski Gannett Peak (the highest point in Wyoming) on Sunday.
• Hike back out to Trail Lake on Memorial Day Monday.

Feeling optimistic on Saturday morning.

Things started off marvelously.  Jeff Judkins and I met at the trailhead and were hiking in lovely temps up to Burro Flats early on Saturday morning.  We were a little surprised to see dry trail all the way over the Flats but with such smooth travel we just went with it.  The first 9 miles or so to the start of the descent to Dinwoody Creek took a little over 3 hours--we were getting optimistic about pulling this thing off!

Not much snow up there on Burro Flats!

Our first view deeper into the winds.  Still pretty dry.

Then the next mile took 2 hours.

We found snow as we descended into the forest, but rather than offering good travel on skis it was patchy and punchy.  On snow, off snow, put on skis, ski across pine needles and grass to the next snow, remove skis and posthole to your nuts.  Just enough snow to hide the trail.  

Brutal.

Looking at our progress, the time of day, and the quality of travel we deduced that we weren't going to make it anywhere near to Gannett and would probably just suffer down to Dinwoody Creek before suffering back out, so we went with Plan B. 

_________

Plan B (more than just a whoops-I-just-got-laid contraceptive):

What was Plan B?  Plan B didn't exist until we got stymied in Plan A, but coming down the south side of Burro Flats we noticed a couple of cirques to the west with what appeared to be a plethora of couloirs hanging in the cliff walls.  Those became Plan B.

Check out those lines!  We would end up referring to them as the Wishbone Couloir, Hambone Couloir, and Golden Couloir.  (L to R)

So we turned away from Gannett and scrambled through boulders and up a little snowfield to a lovely lake without a name, but with a fantastic view into the couloir playland above.  Thus began Plan B, and it was a good plan.

Sunrise on Sunday revealed bluebird skies and warm temps, and we cruised around the edge of the firmly-frozen lake to a day full of steep snow and great turns high in the alpine.

Alpine camp.  Tantalizing view in the background!

Crossing the frozen lake, with the Hambone Couloir in our sights.

The Hambone Couloir was the start of our day.  (So named because it's right next-door to what we called the Wishbone Couloirs.  Were they first descents?  Did we have a right to name them? Who knows?  Who cares?  We had to call them something in order to communicate...)

Jeff climbs out of the top of the Hambone Couloir.

The Hambone gets sun as soon as it crests the horizon, so we knew we needed to get up it early.  It had been sunlit for about an hour by the time we stared climbing, perhaps a bit late, but the slightly softened snow was reassuring in that astonishingly steep terrain.  I mean it looked steep from a distance, but the upper few hundred feet were REALLY steep.  It sure made for fun skiing.

Given our slightly-later-than-optimal timing on this one we had more sluff coming down with us than one might have preferred, but it was manageable enough.

With things continuing to soften in the sun we were happy to be out of the Hambone and move on to something north-facing.  Boulder-hopping down to Florence Lake we were surprised to find a fairly large, hidden cirque with--no shit--over a dozen couloirs flowing into it.  Unreal.

The S Couloir on the left, Dogleg on the right.

Climbing the S.

We headed to the far side of the cirque to poke into a couple of couloirs there, the S and Dogleg.  Having watched a massive cornice fail up the ridge from the Hambone in the morning's sun, we spent the day avoiding terrain that lay beneath hanging snow, which led us to the decision to avoid the Dogleg and just focus on the S Couloir.  Nice step-kicking in late-season, dense powder got us to the top in quick form and we dug out platforms where we could get into our skis.

Tele turns?!  Go Jeff!

The skiing was more interesting than fantastic, at least in the upper couloir--shallowly-buried rock kept things spicey until we dropped lower into deeper snow.  Jeff pulled out the telemark turn for the bulk of this descent--nice style!

Having ruled out the Dogleg as an objective, we decided to head back to the Wishbone Couloirs (next-door to the Hambone) for an afternoon ski before returning to camp.  The South Wishbone had received about an hour of morning sun before the shadow of its massive wall moved over it and kept it cool, so we figured it could be prime for an attempt.

Climbing into the Wishbone Couloirs--South on the left, North on the right.  They both continue well out of view to the ridgecrest above.

And we were right.  Perfect steps in sweet corn up to the high point in the above photo, and half again that amount of vertical gain to the actual top.  Beautiful.

Jeff high in the South Wishbone.  Steep!

Contemplating dropping-in.  Somehow we didn't get a single photo of the skiing.

It turned out to be the best skiing of the day, by far.  Super steep, with great corn and amazing edging--fast and fun all the way to the cirque below.

Jeff and the Wishbone and Hambone Couloirs.  You can just make out our tracks.

We both acknowledged that our legs had had about enough climbing and skiing for the day so we pointed ourselves back to camp and scurried across the sun-warmed lake.  A thin overcast sky rolled in with some wind, so after reviving ourselves with a feed on Idaho's finest instant mashed potatoes (with real butter and bacon flavors!) we packed up camp and moved down to Golden Lake in the hope that we would be more sheltered from the wind.  It also set us up for an early-morning attempt at the Golden Couloir before heading out of the mountains.

Unexpectedly, and counter to the weather forecast, I woke up to big, fat, wet snowfall around 2am.  And rolled over to go back to sleep, snug in my bag in the tent and hoping that it wouldn't produce too much.  Then we woke up at 5 to crystal clear skies and 1/2" of new snow.

Perfect.

Thar she blows!  The Golden Couloir hangs above camp at sunrise.

We couldn't have had better timing in the Golden Couloir.  Firm snow on the climb--just enough to sink crampon toes into--turned to perfect corn for the descent.  Strong, reliable edging with little sluff.

Dropping over the roll and into the elevator shaft.

Which was good--we found the steepest skiing I've ever done in the upper half of the couloir.  Plant a pole, commit to the turn, plummet until ski edges regained contact, repeat.  Over and over and over.  So incredibly fun!

Damn, what at trip.

The Vector BC's were absolutely the shit out there--the Ultimate Mountaineering Ski?  Yes.  Nice and light, amazing on the down, and I only put my skins on once.  (Mostly as a formality.)  Their versatility with the waxless pattern and formidable skiing performance blows the mind.

Back at camp around 7:30 we broke things down and headed out for the exit back to the trucks.  We had spied an alternate route to Burro Flats that would hopefully avoid crappy travel down in the forest and were able to link up snow on skis just about to the top.

A bit of trail hiking in ski boots down the north side brought us to a strip of snow in a gully that we ran out as far as possible.  (And a bit beyond that...)

Aah, that's better.

Stubbornly refusing to give in to trail hiking, we managed to ski to within a half-mile of the switchback descent to Bomber Basin before switching to trail shoes and the trail-pounding out of the mountains.  Back on the trail we again made good time and surprisingly quickly were back within view of the trailhead and the end of our trip.

Cold Miller High Life tasted awfully good after hammering out the trail (still ice in the cooler after 3 days!), so we lounged around in the warm sun and enjoyed a tasty brew before packing up and heading out for the trip home.  I still want to make a Gannett Peak trip work one of these years, but for this year Plan B turned out to be a pretty sweet alternative.

Time to put the skis away and get back on knobby tires.

The 12 Hours... No, 8 Hours... Uhh, 6 Hours of Disco!

The Stats:

• 10 laps
• 84.15 miles
• 10,800' of elevation gain
• 6:19:46 on course
• 1st-Place Solo Male
• # of wrecks: 1

The 12 Hours of Disco whimpered its way to the start line on Saturday morning, and went off with a whistle rather than a bang.  (Given the number of shotguns at the base area there actually may have been mucho bangs but I didn't hear them in my mad sprint to my bike and out onto the course.)  More on that in a bit.

As I like to do for races that involve some travel, we showed up in Salmon, Idaho a day early to give me a chance to pre-ride the course and for us to have a day to enjoy one of the area's many hot springs.

And then it rained.

A lot.

My Thursday evening pre-ride was actually great (it preceded the rain), and got me all stoked up to race.  The intent was to enjoy a low-intensity spin and get to know the course, but the trails were so buff and fast and I was having so much fun that I kept finding myself riding harder than intended to keep the fun and flow high.  The course was definitely the highlight of the weekend's event, and the LESter ate it up.  I've never had a bike that feels like such a natural fit and makes high-speed riding so fun!

Sometime Thursday night I heard a patter start up on the truck roof, and when I got up to make coffee on Friday morning it felt downright Irish.  My parents would have called it "soft weather".

So we bailed on our hike-in-to-a-hot-spring plan and drove to one instead.  As the day progressed emails and text messages flew around wondering about whether the race would go off or not.  Then sometime in the afternoon word came from race organizer Max that it was happening, but with a 10am start instead of 7 (to give the trails a chance to dry out a bit in the morning) and a yet-to-be-determined abbreviated format.

Maybe a 4-mile loop of dirt roads for 6 hours?  Yuck.  Maybe an 8.5-mile loop of singletrack for 8 hours?  That sounds better...

Go!
Photo: Gene Marcowka

The late start turned out to be perfect--things were still a little soupy when we showed up around 8, but were rolling quite nicely by the time we rolled out for 8 hours of racing on (roughly) the original 8.5-mile loop.  For once I managed to get off the line fast and onto singletrack with the lead pack.  There were maybe 6 of us, mostly singlespeeders, with a few guys from the Pro Leisure Team that I've gotten to ride with in Boise--these guys rip!  Really fun romping around the first lap with them.

And then they swapped out with their teammates and I was the lone solo rider up front.  Laps 2 and 3 felt a bit harder, then on Lap 4 I had finally warmed up and was flowing.  Fast spinning on winding singletrack through fields of sagebrush is rad.

At the start of Lap 5, Erica (the Ultimate Superhot Support Crew) 

 told me that I was 7 minutes up on the next soloist at the last trip through base, so I figured I'd push a bit to see if I could open up the gap.  Then at the next lap I was 6 minutes up, then 4 minutes, then 3.5 minutes.  Who was this guy?  I felt like I was pushing hard and he just kept closing on me!

Having a great time despite a shrinking lead!

It's weird getting 40-minute old information about how the gap looked a lap prior, but Erica certainly helped me stay on the gas through the second half of the race.  After Lap 7 she yelled that I wasn't drinking enough, and she turned out to be right--everything felt better once I focused on taking in more liquid.  What a manager.

Heading out for Lap 9 I learned that I had opened the gap back up to 7 minutes--phew!

I also noticed really dark clouds rolling in.  The wind had been kicking for a while and we had a brief shower during Lap 8, but I could tell we were going to get really wet once the wall of doom reached us.

And then Lap 10--full-on rain.  A screaming fast singletrack downhill in the first mile was total grease (snot-on-a-marble, as my best friend Dave likes to say)--I barely made the hard right turn at the bottom.  I was fortunate that the course was mostly just wet and slick, and allowed me to hammer through it for what turned out to be my final lap.  Not long after that it turned from grease to gumbo.

Rolling into the finish of my last lap.

They called it at 4pm, and pretty much everybody who came through the finish after me had picked up pounds of wet clay on their bikes and bodies.  Alex Phipps snapped off his rear derailleur within 100' of the finish, trying to shift a mud-packed drivetrain on the last climb.  The mud was virtually unrideable, and more bikes were carried over the finish line than were pushed.  Racers walking up the final climb were wiping out face-first in the mud.  Brutal.

Jason celebrates a muddy Duo Team win, and a hilarious fashion sense.

But eventually everybody made it in, and I won the Solo division!  My first overall win--pretty fun having a singlespeed take the day.  (I took 1st-Place Solo at the Knobby 9-to-5 last year, but somehow that felt less legit with me racing in the Singlespeed division rather than the Open.)  I was disappointed to see the Duo teams all scored together instead of being broken out into Male/Female/Mixed--the teams that won definitely raged, but there were some really strong women's teams that received no recognition.  Lame.

An informal podium.

For myself, it felt good to see this season's training produce a strong performance, and to have a mechanical-free race.  Huge thanks to Pivot, American Classic, Endless Bikes, Loaded Precision, and Crank Brothers for helping me build the LESter into my dream machine!

Sunday's recovery.  I love hot springs.

Now it's back to training and getting myself ready for this year's Knobby 9-to-5 on June 8th.

And a bit of late-season ski mountaineering in the Wind Rivers...  (That counts as training, right?)

Blown Away

Damn, it seems like it's been one of those seasons where I turn back from more skiing than I accomplish.  I mean, we all know that not every day can be a successful mission but this is getting depressing.

Jason Berning and I took Sunday to try and ski the Amore Vide ("Love of my Life" in Italian) Couloir off of the South Teton.  Saturday, of course, was bluebird with little wind--felt pretty good for a massive group ride on the roads.  It also would've been perfect for skiing in the alpine.  Sunday was not.

Feeling optimistic at sunrise.  Photo: Jason Berning

But things were looking pretty good as we clomped away from the truck with the alpenglow of sunrise illuminating the high peaks.  After about a mile we found mostly-consistent enough snow to start skinning, and easy travel from there.  The melt-freeze from the last week had left a remarkably rough texture to the snow surface--it was like having spidey-skins climbing up the steeper pitches into Garnet Canyon.

Looks grey up there!  Photo: Jason Berning

Once we hit the Meadows things started to go downhill.  A thin overcast was rolling in rapidly and it started to get breezy.  As we continued up-canyon the wind picked up and seemed to blow an extra 10mph with every horizon we surmounted until we were nearly reduced to crawling in the final basin below the saddle between the Middle and South.

Jason fights the wind after retrieving a hat that blew away down the moraines.

Phew!  We're out of here.

Getting blown 5-10' sideways and backwards seemed a poor setup for trying to ski off of an exposed summit, so we clawed our way out of the windblasted moraines and onto skiable "snow" to get the hell down.  Which is about all it was--getting the hell down.  Bulletptoof sastrugi peppered with refrozen wet avalanche debris doesn't make for fun or aesthetic turns.  Definitely not the "Love of my Life".

Mmm...bulletproof.

Watching the world blow past my ski tips.

Steeper in the Cave Couloir, and a hair softer.  Photo: Jason Berning

We hoped to find better snow blown into the Cave Couloir, but mostly just found steeper bullet-resistant.  (Maybe a touch softer than bulletproof.)  The Cave offered a welcome break for lunch as we listened to the roar of the wind over the higher ridgelines.  I've heard that exfoliation is good for your skin, but my face appreciated getting out of the wind and ground-blizzard.

Seeking shelter from the storm.  Photo: Jason Berning

The view from the Cave--pretty cool!

This season's favorite ski lunch?  Peanut butter, Nutella, and fruit.  Strawberries on this day, but bananas are another good choice.

The one highlight of the day (other than having an adventure with Jason) was seeing what the new Voilé Vector BC's could do.  I had high expectations from the start, and was not disappointed.  Light, stiff, and snappy.  Paired with Voilé's skins (check out that tip clip!) they climbed like a beast and with a stiff flex, relatively narrow waist (96mm) and long sidecut they handled the "firm" conditions in Garnet Canyon as well or better than anything else I've skied.

Trying to link-up snow as long as possible before walking out in ski boots.

Hard to believe...

And that was that.  The skiing improved the further we descended, until we hit Bradley Lake and stripped to shirts and ball caps.  Hard to believe how gnarly it was up high once we were standing in the sauna-like temps at the lake shore.  Damn.

One more note on the new skis--no skins for the trip out!  The waxless pattern took me across the lake and through the moraines without a thought, and pretty soon we were back to walking a dry trail for the final mile.  If anything, it was a little unnerving working through some of the skinny-snow stretches without skins on to slow me down.  I'm looking forward to taking these things into the Wind Rivers!

Saturday Afternoon Romp

The Stats:

• 10.8 miles
• 1650' of climbing
• 1st-Place Singlespeed, 3rd-Place Expert Men
• 51:33 to the finish
• # of Wrecks:  I once again managed to keep my bicycle upright throughout.

Having just spent the week working in Salt Lake City, I decided to skip the dreary weather at home and last-minute-enter the Utah State Championship Series XC race in Alpine on Saturday.  Then I woke up Saturday morning to dreary rain--oh well.  The singlespeed wave wasn't scheduled to go off until 1pm and it had to dry out by then, right?

It actually was nicer--partly sunny--as I drove south through American Fork and found the venue on a sage- and scrub oak-covered hillside at the base of the big mountains.  (Southern Wasatch?)  The morning's deluge had left the course soggy, so our start times were bumped back 90 minutes to allow for a bit of drying.  Perfect for letting me digest the huge brunch I had just consumed with Mary and Nils, and a nice opportunity to take a brief nap in the warm truck.

Race organizer Bob Saffell's bike after re-marking the course.  Yup, it's soggy out there.
Photo: MTBRace Productions

It also gave me time to do a couple of warm-up laps on the course. We were supposed to race 4 laps on a 3.4-mile loop but the soggy weather had forced removal of a fair bit of climbing and an amazing descent, dropping the lap distance to 2.7 miles.  So it made sense to warm up on the course and get to know it before hitting it full-tilt.  Turns out that a 45-minute warm-up was just about right--I hit the line feeling loose and ready.

I typically choose to starting slow and gradually work into my race pace (metaphor for life?), but with this being more of a sprint I wanted to try a different approach.  My plan, given that I rarely go out for these hot-and-fast type races and I already had my heartrate up, was to get off the line at full-speed and try to enter the twisty singletrack in the lead.  I had no idea if it would work, but why not give it a try?  Turns out that I wasn't the only one with that plan, and that Alex Smith had pre-loaded his quads with lightning and was almost out of view by the time I got my feet clipped into my pedals.

So I spent the remainder of the race trying to close the gap between us.  Shannon Boffelli and I got stuck behind a couple of slower riders in a tight, hard-to-pass section of singletrack midway through the first lap, which allowed Alex to open up a bigger lead, and when we rolled through basecamp to head out on Lap 2 we heard that Alex was 55 seconds up.  Crap.

So I picked it up on the climb out of basecamp and was 30 seconds back at the end of lap 3.  Then starting into Lap 4 I could see Alex about 35 yards up and started to feel a shred of hope.  By this point I had recognized that I was making time on the climbs and losing it on the twisty descents.  In reality, I'm not in technical racing form--too early in the season for me to have spent any significant time on dirt.  So I mashed as hard as my quads would support on the ups and did my best to stay off the brakes on the downs.  I kept catching glimpses of Alex's white jersey through the scrub oak but didn't really get close enough to feel optimistic until the bottom of the lap heading into the climbing back up to the finish, with about 1/2-mile left.

I finally made contact when we came out of the woods onto the 200-yard pavement climb to the end, and we sprinted it out right through the line.  Alex is damn strong; I just had a touch more juice left in my legs and was able to squeak it out by 2 seconds.  Definitely the day's most exciting finish according to the finish line spectators.

It felt great to go that hard--we don't really do that in the 100-milers.  The LES and AC wheels performed beautifully once again, and the new Endless Bikes cogs are proving to be freaking awesome.  Now I just need to remind myself how to charge the downhills.

Damn, mountain biking is fun.

*Sorry about the lack of images--I was there solo and my camera batteries were dead.  Lame.

Stuff N' Things

I had high hopes of getting up into the Tetons for some adventure this weekend, but between our "unsettled" weather and a sore back I've been stuck at home riding rollers and contemplating the things that help me get out on adventures.  In all fairness, I could have bundled up and ridden through the wind-driven snain, but why?

Some fun stuff came together in the last week, in both the skiing and singlespeeding worlds.  On Monday a pair of Voilé Vector BC's arrived for me at Yostmark--quite possibly the ultimate mountaineering ski.

WAY light, with a relatively narrow waist at 96mm (at least compared to your average Teton powder ski) and a long turn radius--can't wait to get out on these boards.  They're pretty similar to the Dynafit Manaslu (similar dimensions and weight,) but unlike the Manaslu these are wonderfully stiff and Voilé didn't skimp on edges or base material to achieve their svelte figure.  These things are bomber, and they're manufactured right here in the USA--down in Salt Lake.

Speaking of base material, perhaps the biggest reason I'm stoked for these skis is what they have underfoot: a waxless pattern!

Freaking brilliant.  No more skins for all the flat travel into and out from the mountains.  Across the lake, through the moraines...  Sure, there's some question about how much glide I'll give up in exchange for the grip but I don't think it will be that noticeable.  If everything comes together I'm hoping to take these into the Wind Rivers for some long miles and steep skiing at the end of May--will report back on the waxless performance after that testing.

Voilé also sent some skins, a ski version of what they've been offering for their splitboards--standard orange plush, but check out that tip clip!  Burly.  So I pulled a pair of Dynafit Speed Radical bindings off of another pair of skis and got these mounted up, ready to chase Z around the mountains once the weather clears.  At least I won't be able to blame my skis for being too heavy.


On the mountain bike front, I finally completed the build on the LES.

Some beautiful red cogs arrived from Endless Bikes, along with a Fibonacci Spacer Kit.  Manufactured in the US out of 7075-T6 aluminum the cogs are WICKED light, and at a full quarter-inch wide at the base they'll sit snug and won't damage that expensive freehub.

I went full-geek and weighed the new 20-tooth Endless cog against the 20-tooth steel cog that I've been riding on: less than half the weight!   Damn.  And far more attractive.

"The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the previous two. The sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc. Numbers in this sequence are found throughout nature, such as the number of spirals in seed bearing plants like sunflowers and pinecones, as well as in the number of petals on flowers."

Endless' spacer system is pretty amazing--provides a complete variety necessary to achieve a perfect chainline and instructions on how to do it.  Why does it matter?  Silence.  And efficiency.  (Any bending in the chain adds friction to the system.)

The last bit of riding-related stuff was recommended to me by Fitzy teammate and self-described cycling junkie Dave Byers.  As a singlespeed rider I'm swapping out cogs on the rear wheel with some frequency depending on the amount of climbing/flat spinning on a given course, and this new tool from Abbey Bike Works totally changes that experience.

No longer do I have to remove the skewer and find a wrench to use with my standard lockring tool--this thing fits around the end of the 10mm thru-axle and has its own ample handle.  At $35 it was well worth purchasing.  Makes me happy.

And that's about enough gear spewing for one day.  Heading to Pocatello in search of rideable singletrack; whatever we find will for sure be better than what we have at home right now!