Mount Ellis

A short approach and a good run when the snow is fresh. We got up and down it right before the previous nights snow started melting.

Scrubfest

I went to a splitboard festival in Wyoming this weekend. It was fun riding with a pack of snowboarders. The Grand Teton is a big mountain.

North Bridgers

Here's a couple pics from a snowmobile rescue/snowboard morning trip Patrick and I did a week or so ago. In typical Bozeman ski-scene fashion we ran into my friend Bob the skier on top of the line we wanted to ski.

Update

It was a busy weekend. I did the King of the Ridge at Bridger Bowl on Saturday for the 5th time and managed to win again with 26 hikes and got the very useful prizes of $250 cash and a pair of sunny day goggles. I got rested up that night and then went and did some shooting of guns with Marshall on Sunday, who was visiting for the weekend and now owns nothing less then an AK-47 (that came with a bayonet?). Yes, it's completely unnecessary and ridiculous to own such a gun. It is also quite fun to shoot.

I went on a long and arduous ski trip up to the Mount Cowen cirque on Monday in celebration of President's day. It is a really cool area, and the sunny weather got me caught up on my vitamin D for the next week or so. I was worried I was going to run out of food, but fortunately I remembered I had some Gummy Bacon Jesse had given me for Christmas and it saved the day.


That night I went to the Maxey Cabin up Hyalite with Marshall and others. Now I'm watching the lunar eclipse and getting ready to scrounge up some dinner.

Massive weirdness

Oh, there's the Tobacco Root mountains, off in the distance. . .



And then I looked closely. . .

They aren't actually giant, 11,000 foot mesas. It was what's known as a superior mirage, as opposed to the inferior ones you see on the ground. It was really, really, exceptionally strange. There was no shimmering, and it looked like this the whole 15 minutes or so we were up on top of the Bridgers looking at them.

The Bridger Bowl Cloud

Commonly referred to as the BBC. It sits over Bridger most of the time. On exceptionally windy days it can look like this:
(click for larger)

Which kind of resembles an alien spaceship once you get under it. The day I took this there were 60mph winds on the mid-mountain and several lifts had to be closed.

Elephanthead Mountain.

It was a long ways in with 6 pounds of wet snow stuck to each ski. At least the temperature eventually dropped below freezing and there was some windblown crust and powder to ski on the top. It definitely built a lot of character.




EDIT: And the snowboarding was pretty good on a lot of it. And I've managed to forget about the bad parts already.

North Bridgers

It was good. Miraculously the sun was out for most of the day. The vast majority of my North Bridger time has been spent inside a cloud so it was great to see what was going on. Conditions allowed us to snowboard a particularly prominent face that has been tempting me for several years. On top of that the snow was excellent powder with a somewhat solid base and provided excellent riding.

More photos here