America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
Hey Michael,
Nice Blog! Just spent a bit of time checking it out. So I have a question. My husband and I are heading north (we’re from Colorado) to do some backcountry skiing and mountain biking. Usually we end up in the Tetons. The couple times we have gone to Ketchum/Stanley, Idaho, zone we’ve been shut out though—once with bad weather and also lack of snow. I heard that the Sawtooths got a lot of snow, so once again we want to explore.
By Michael Lanza
Fresh snow from the storm of the past couple of days blankets the ground, padding by inches a white comforter several feet thick. Ponderosa pine boughs sag under the weight of a substance equivalent to an awful lot of very tiny feathers. But that storm has passed like a dream you can’t quite recall. Now, the sun throws operating-room brilliance on every nook and cranny of a mountain I’ve come to know well enough to have a detailed map of its terrain in my head.
It’s the kind of winter day you want to put in a leftovers box, to save some of it for later.
Unfortunately, no one has yet invented a box like that. So two friends and I will cut laborious zigzags uphill and float downhill on our skis until our time limitations—and our legs—inform us it’s time to head home. And in the long stretches of silence, when we’re strung out in a line climbing uphill, or taking turns riding gravity like it was a galloping horse, I’ll find myself contemplating the curious intersection of chance, passion, and geography where we find ourselves falling in love with an obscure spot on the map.
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.
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.
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.