backcountry skiing

Rediscovering A Sense of Wonder: Backcountry Skiing the Tetons

by

By Michael Lanza

The morning air at 8,800 feet in Wyoming’s Teton Range hovers in the single digits Fahrenheit, and the breeze wields a below-zero wind chill like a straight razor: It feels on the verge of shaving the two-day-old beard from my face. In blinding sunshine, six of us step outside the Baldy Knoll yurt to find at least six inches of light powder—cold smoke—that fell overnight atop the 10 inches of snow that had dropped from the generous heavens in recent days. We arrived here late yesterday afternoon, just a couple hours before the frozen waterfall of fat, featherweight snowflakes began pouring copiously from a coal-black night sky.

Skiing in the mountains, as with anything else in life, is really all about timing. And sometimes you just get lucky.

Read on

Skiing off the back side of Clipper Gap, above Norway Basin in Oregon's Wallowa Mountains.

Featured Photo Gallery: Backcountry Skiing Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains

by

By Michael Lanza

After a ski guide friend repeatedly e-mailed several of us photos of the snow-plastered, jagged mountains of Norway Basin in the Eagle Cap Wilderness of Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains, we had to go explore this place ourselves. By that first night in the Norway Basin yurt, we had decided to return again the next winter. Check out this photo gallery of some select shots from that trip; whether you’re a backcountry skier, snowshoer, or neither, you can’t help but be awed by these remote peaks. Then see my full story about that trip for more photos, a video, and tips on planning it.

Read on

Freeman Peak, Boise Mountains, Idaho

A 12-Year-Old’s First Time Skiing Wild Snow

by

By Michael Lanza

The sun burns atomically from a sky polished to a flawless blue. Heat reflects up at us from the snow covering this mountainside in southwest Idaho, making March feel like June. New snow cloaks the boughs of the ponderosa pines and blankets the ground, powder light enough to scoop into your hand and blow away like feathers.

It’s a perfect day for any beginning, especially for a first time doing anything outdoors. My 12-year-old son, Nate, 85 pounds of expectation, clicks his boots into bindings and grins at me, displaying equal parts eagerness and curiosity for his first-ever day of backcountry skiing.

Read on

Backcountry skiing below Mt. Heyburn, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho.

Hidden Paradise: Backcountry Skiing Idaho’s Sawtooths

by

By Michael Lanza

At a pass just below 9,400 feet on the north side of 10,229-foot Mt. Heyburn, in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, the wind that has been steadily turning the dial upward for the past hour reaches full volume. Another snow squall bursts upon us, spraying white bullets sideways and dropping a veil over the rocky, snow-spattered, serrated ridge just overhead.

Six of us have labored 2,000 feet uphill on skis this morning in search of a doorway into a secluded mountain paradise of sorts, a high basin known in some circles as the Monolith Valley, though not marked as such on any map. A slender gash between Heyburn and another 10,000-footer, Braxon Peak (which I’ve stood atop in summer), the Monolith exists in the topographical shadows, easily overlooked. Most of our group have only seen tantalizing photos that revealed legions of rock spires towering above untracked snow. The images inspired visions of marking up deep powder on slopes rarely inscribed by skiers—like Zorro, but leaving many “S” signatures instead of a “Z.”

Read on

Bottomless Powder, Big Ski Lines in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains

by

By Michael Lanza

We reach a high saddle between two peaks, where the wind has sculpted the snow into stationary, perpetually cresting waves several feet high. Treeless slopes of clean, untracked powder fall away beneath us. Our group of several friends and a few guides have been climbing uphill in this remote corner of northeast Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains for more than two hours, ascending some 3,000 vertical feet under a clear, ice-blue winter sky, amid scenery that looks like a post card from an Alpine resort, but without the ski lifts and quaint villages.

Read on