Sorry if this post is a little short. I’m pretty exhausted, as I went mountain biking and hiked snowbowl after work today, but I wanted to get some pictures posted from this past weekend for everyone to see before moving on to the next adventure.

This past weekend was a great time. Not the best snow, as is illustrated by the hike in (picture below) but the cabin was awesome, and we had a lot of fun.

Jeremy and I got up there on thursday morning, and were in to the cabin by mid-day. We went out for a look around, and ended up grabbing a couple thousand vertical which included the couloir you see in the background here.

Unfortunately, the snow was pretty bad, but it was fun wallowing our way up a bootpack straight up the center of the couloir. Justin, Rocco, and Ken showed up later in the evening to complete the crew for the weekend.

On friday we set out to try and find some better snow. We hiked in about 1.5 miles to one of the basins south of the cabin and did some scouting. The rest of the crew found a chute that they skinned up which had a bit of promising soft stuff on top. I was in a bit of my own little world anyways, so I decided to do a little tour around a treed area to take a look at the other part of the basin. I hoofed it up another 800 feet of vertical on the edge of the trees, and then ducked in near the top when it started getting windy. Lo and behold, there was powder in them trees!

So I skiied down through some 8-10 inches of powder, through perfectly spaced trees on a consistantly 40-50 degree slope. Absolutely marvelous.

I grabbed the other guys, and we headed up for another run in the trees.

We headed back down to the cabin after that run, and got a little lost on the way back. Fortunately, Ken and Rocco came prepared for just such an occasion.

Yes, that’s Sparks.

We cooked some dinner and had a rousing evening of Euchre, courtesy of some lessons from the two midwest boys (me – indiana, ken – wisconsin).

On saturday rocco and justin were a bit bushed, so Ken, Jeremy, and I took off mid-morning to find some more powder. We had eyed up the next set of trees east of where we were on friday, and so we hit that first. Unfortunately, the snow wasn’t the best (but it was pretty decent) and we ended up doing a lot of bootpacking at the top of the run.

We hit that run, and then took two in the trees from the day before. The snow was still great.

Finally, we headed back to the cabin, ate some dinner, played some more cards, and zonked out pretty quickly from another hard day of skiing.

Sunday was reserved for cleaning up and heading out. We made it out to the cars around 11am, where we changed clothes, had a celebratory beer and attempted to rejoin society. I don’t think it worked very well.

I had a lot more pictures from the trip than the ones above, and they’re all in a gallery here. Check them out, it’s a good time, I swear.