Spring in the San Juans

The shoulder seasons are when SW Colorado shine, and I’m too indecisive to ever choose which shoulder is my favorite. This spring was a brief one for me in the San Juan Mountains, sandwiched between a season in Patagonia and season in Chamonix, but I savored the time nonetheless.

Early spring was filled with desert trips and re-acclimating after a winter at nearly sea level.

One spring training mission was a solo Ophir to Telluride ski tour on a storm day, skiing my Nth lap on the classic San Joaquin along the way. I get kinda bored with the always-perfect Colorado weather, so days like this one where I’m fighting the ping pong ball and wondering if it’ll go are always a treat. Skiing a foot of powder in one of Telluride’s most famous backcountry lines - the San Joaquin Couloir - was pretty epic. The hitchhike back to Ophir was pretty quick and easy, too.

More Ophir: dropping into the ‘Muggs Stump Couloir’ off of Ophir Peak (left). This is a great way to start a day of bagging couloirs in the Swamp Ck drainage (probably the most couloir-dense zone in the San Juans) after starting from the town of Ophir. On the right is a photo from the top of the Flicker Pinner off of Lookout Ridge, looking towards U.S. Grant Pk across the valley. Lines, lines everywhere! The Flicker Pinner has a very cool tunnel feature off to the side of the main couloir… you’ll just have to go find that one.

From a day of skiing the '420 Tour’ with my friend Kyle - so named because I’ve skied it on 4/20 on almost every year I’ve lived here, and the snow is always good. It links up San Miguel Pk and it’s NW-facing couloir with 'The Illusion’ into the 'Mega Bowl’. 'The Illusion > Mega Bowl’ is pictured above, the illusion being you can’t see where the line drops from (from the ridgecrest, through the cliffs!). Personally, I think this is the single most classic ski tour in the Lizard Head Pass area and one of the best in the San Juans. As always, feel free to message me if you’d like more beta.

Shout out to my good friend Jeromy Markee for making me look cooler than I am on this beta burn up Pat’s Blue Ribbon 5.13-, out in Indian Creek. The thin, new age style Creek routes are some of my favorite, and the airy arete boulder problem on this one is extra cool! I wore my La Sportiva Theory slippers when I came back to this one (an extra soft comp shoe) - not a shoe that I’d ever expect to wear on a crack climb, but they proved to be the ticket for the soft smears surrounding this .3/.2 crack.

Top belay with mini traxions, ESPECIALLY when belaying two followers. I started doing this back in 2017, and got yelled at by my climbing partner. Now all the cool kids are doing it. Highly recommended. Taken while climbing 'Vision Quest’ on King of Pain tower - one of the best tower routes, IMO!

I joined a couple of friends out along the lower Dolores River one weekend for some new routing. The Dolores Canyon, Paradox and Big Gypsum Valleys, etc etc are all rich with lightly traveled Wingate Sandstone, though some areas sport higher quality rock than others. On this weekend we were along Rd Y11 north of Big Gypsum. Rock quality on this one looked questionable, but ended up climbing quite nice. The route follows a steep roof crack up to a thin, flared finger crack on a slabbier face protected by blind placements. “Bikini Ax Baddie” 5.12- R, FA Micah Tedeschi and Charlie Malone (with a shoutout to Lexi Lyle).

Couple more shots of Micah on the send. His first FA!

After that, I couldn’t resist cruising over to Moab to check out a classic ice climb that was potentially in (I had heard it was). “Pleiades” is a popular summer canyoneering route located up in the La Sal Mountains that sometimes freezes into a 5-pitch WI3 climb. It sounded neat, but the reality far exceeded my expectations.

I couldn’t recreate the reverberating gong of swinging axes into ice in a slot canyon even if I tried. A totally unique land and soundscape. Parts of the route were essentially a tunnel of bright red sandstone with a glowing turquoise ribbon of ice to lead the way. The climbing was very easy, but I’d put in it in the top 3 ice climbs I’ve ever done (and there’s some classics on that list!). I can’t imagine a more aesthetic or engaging WI 2/3 route anywhere. The entire outing was also only an hour car to car, with 20 minutes of that on route. Worth going a little out of my way for, for sure.

I really wished I had my real camera + a climbing partner in the Pleiades, but I will admit there’s a sanctity to going without both. And yep, you do get to squeeze through that hole on the last pitch.

Speaking of classic ice routes, I finally got to climb Ames Ice Hose this March - the closest mega classic ice climb to my house, but one that I’ve never gotten around to actually doing (it is pretty intimidating!). I was freshly back from Patagonia and totally haggard and jet lagged, so Nick was courteous enough to rope gun the thing.

The Ames Ice Hose in all it’s glory (left), Nick Neibuhr leading pitch 2 (right). Pitch two is steeper than it looks, often hollow, but also often incredibly picked out. You get some cool stemming and chimney work on the rock.

Me following P1 of the Ice Hose. This pitch can be climbed as thin ice, fat WI4 in a good year, or spicy M6 rock. The ice to the left was delammed, brittle and unprotectable this late in the season, so we chose rock. It’s not as spicy as some say - the crux moves are fairly well protected by a fixed nut. The remainder of the pitch is secure 5.8-ish climbing, but pretty much all the available gear is choss in some way - like the blue #3 cam behind a totally detached flake that you see above.

Then back to the desert - here are a handful of photos of Gaar Lausman climbing 'Winner Takes All’ 5.13- at the Disappointment Cliffs. I’ve wanted to climb this one for years after seeing some cool photos of Steph Davis on it way back when. It’s really good! Hard, sustained, straightforward finger locks. No boulder problem crux, just enduro crack climbing.

And one more photo of Gaar digging deep on his “sky proj” - I’ll wait for him to drop further details on that!

Okay, deep breath, we’re almost done.

A little more skiing! I disappeared to Chamonix for like 6 weeks (more on that later), and came back looking to milk what I could out of the remaining ski season.

First day back exploring “Les Aiguilles de Mancos”. With La Plata Canyon road open, I took the opportunity to hopefully find good conditions on some seldom-skied lines off of Spiller and Babcock Peaks. After hiking 2000 feet to skiable snow, I climbed Spiller, skied a line on it’s north face (different than the Spillway/Ray’s Couloir which Nick and I skied last year), traversed the Knife (a classic summer scramble linking Spiller with Babcock, a proper alpine adventure in winter conditions), and skied 'the Blade’, a truly classic couloir descending off the Knife just west of West Babcock. Highly visible from Hwy 160 at Hesperus. If you live in the area, you’ve oggled it.

The mountains got a good dump of powder on top of a settled snow pack in the days prior, making for some of best, fastest and most blower conditions I had skied all year.

Left: starting across 'The Knife’ in proper alpine conditions. Right: Spiller’s NE Couloir. A whiteout, but deep pow.

Hot pow (it warms up fast in May) in 'The Blade’, featuring my brand new Hagan Core Lite 89s. So fast, so rippable. There is a small WI2 or rock step lower down in this couloir, keeping the riff raff out. I think it’s one of the most fun couloirs I’ve skied in the area.

Telephoto of Babcock’s couloirs. Left most is the Blade, with it’s crux step visible down low. Middle is the Pencil, which can be more ice than snow but is still skiable. With a light pair of skis and axes, you can have a really fun day up here in the spring - there a variety of easy ice and rock climbs that link up into fun ski descents. Maybe not worth bringing a rope and kit for, but super fun if you’re solo and can move fast.

I have more to add but I guess that’s the photo limit for a blog post. Whew! My last ski day of the season was on Mt. Sneffels, which I summitted twice - skiing the Birthday Chutes on lap #1, and the Snake on lap #2. I have never once got good conditions in the Snake.

After scraping my way down the barely-edgeable ice in the Snake Couloir, I got sucked into the waist-deep isothermic slush of Blaine Basin. It took me an hour to travel a downhill mile through the trees. Yeah, I think that’s enough for the season.

Patagonia Dreaming

Morning mate and jam. Bariloche, Argentina.

The simple rock n’ roll instrumentation of Sumo’s greatest hits album, an Argentinian classic, fills the ambient void. The sun sinks below the distant mountains - I can only guess their names - and the twinkle of the Crux starts to appear. But it’s 10 PM and the days are long, there will be light in the sky for some time yet. We’re south of the 45th parallel and not long past the austral summer solstice.

Sean nods off in the back seat and up front in shotgun I fight the urge not to do the same so as to keep Felipe company. It’s been a long day on the road. The scenery, though Patagonia as a whole is the most beautiful landscape I could conceptualize, is monotonous. True to his reputation as the Belgian big wall troubadour, Sean brought five different wind instruments on this trip and the jams have carried us down hundreds of miles of unpaved highway but that contagious energy has waned this late in the day. Soon we’ll find a place to pull over and sleep.

Sean teaching Walas how to play the gaita.

It was probably 15 years prior that I watched Patagonia Dreams (a film made by a young Sean Villanueva-O'Driscoll, the professional climber currently nodding off in the backseat) as a budding teenage rock climber - was that the first time I consciously wished to go there? - no, that was before that, maybe sometime in middle school when I would spend hours on Google Earth, when the most vibrant color palette around the southern tip of the American continent caught my eye. Turquoise lakes big enough to be a freshwater sea, expansive ice fields, verdant temperate rain forests. But maybe it was even earlier still, when I saw Galen Rowell’s classic photo of a herd of mustangs galloping in front of the Chalten Massif in a coffee table book, a scene so magical I couldn’t believe it existed on Earth. Who knows. Whatever it was, Patagonia has permeated my soul for a long, long time and the call of the place is one I’ve had the privilege of answering several times since 2019

Galen Rowell’s famous photograph - taken decades before Ruta 40 and the establishment of the town of El Chalten.

These mountains have shaped me as a person, as a photographer, as a climber - they’ve given me enough trauma for months worth of therapy right alongside some of the best and most triumphant memories I’ve ever had. I’ve met some of my closest friends there, found the best ice cream in the world, discovered what rappelling in the middle of hurricane-force winds feels like, and brought back a persistent mate habit. In Chalten I’ve learned to love bouldering and do away with consistent sleep schedules, that cake is the only choice for breakfast after stumbling out of the mountains, and a ribeye is best consumed around a bonfire with your bare hands. I’ve climbed some of the cleanest granite hand cracks I could imagine, chopped ice out of an offwidth while still wearing rock shoes, slept while sitting upright on a tiny ledge, and climbed up onto the summit in the middle of the night with expansive constellations and the endless Southern Icefield to augment our headlamps. The kind of memories to relive often, and I do.

“Can you pour some mate?” Felipe asks.

Shit, I was nodding off. I grab the thermos - still hot - and pour hot water over the cup of dried leaves that’s been keeping us semi-caffeinated for the last several hours. Sean’s snoring. Here we are, recreating a scene straight out of Patagonia Dreams, same main character and all. They say don’t meet your heroes, but I’m glad we met Sean and that he decided to join us for this journey.

The headlights of the tiny car illuminate a neon orange sign: “Precaucion: Zona de Baches” it says. Potholes. The experience of driving Ruta 40 is defined by dodging them. This time, someone’s spray-painted over ‘baches’ and replaced it with 'crateres’. We chuckle.

We chuckle until the crater bigger than our car comes into the narrow visibility range of the headlights and Felipe swerves. The driver’s side tire clips the edge of the pothole and gives us a little kick - are we airborne? - followed by the metallic clang as the cars comes back down to earth and the axle slams the crest of the embankment. The car keeps on rolling.

Wasn’t the first time this had happened, we already left the HVAC system’s hot water line on the side of the road a hundred miles back. High-centered the thing right around the same time. We knew the bald tires were on their last legs and I was holding my breath waiting for a flat. Passing a variety of broken-down Hiluxes added to the feeling of walking into Mordor. This hit was particularly jarring but I don’t know what was said, if anything. I do remember it was awfully quiet as we continued down the highway at a conservative 25 MPH, all of us now wide awake.

We pulled off onto the first ranch road we could find and threw our sleeping bags on the ground. The stars shone bright, and this far away from any source of light pollution we could make out the Magellenic Clouds. Someone lit a spliff.

Tomorrow the sound of Siete Venas’ song 'Homenaje’ would power us through the home stretch as we rolled into El Chalten - “ay yi yi yi!” - joy unbridled on the coolest stretch of road in the world, three days later we would be digging a tent platform out of the full meter of fresh summer snow at Piedra Negra, and the day after that would start with headlamps and be filled with the sound of crampons on granite and brittle thin ice. But tonight would be a quiet one, with only a crisp breeze drifting across the pampas and another selection of Patagonia dreams to file away for safekeeping.

Though perhaps not all in one piece, we made it.

Klickitat - North Face of the Northwest Ridge

Whew, what a mouthful of a ski descent.

Only in the Cascades can you have the best day of the ski season on June 22. The NFNWR is a classic line first skied by the legendary Glen Plake, and is perhaps ‘the line’ on the young volcano known as Klickitat or Pahto or Mt. Adams.

I drove to the trailhead from the north, from Index, with plans on meeting a friend who came from the south. The trailhead is on a remote side of the mountain, accessed via 35+ miles of dirt road. My friend, Erik, had smooth sailing on his journey, arriving right at the time we planned to meet.

While he was setting up camp, relaxing with an early dinner, and enjoying the sunset on the mountain, and perhaps vaguely wondering where I might be, I was frantically trying to shovel my high-centered car out from a slurry of mud and snow, still five miles away from the trailhead. I multitasked by swatting mosquitos with a great enough density to kill 6 per slap, truly the icing on a pretty f'ed up cake.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t going to get my little AWD hatchback un-stuck, so I laced up the running shoes and used the best mode of transportation I had available to go find Erik. Our simple exchange upon me jogging (not driving) up to the trailhead conveyed a bigger story than was spoken - “hey! …oh, shit?” “yeah, shit” “oh, shit!!”

One quick recovery mission, a rushed dinner, and 3 hours of sleep later, our skis were on our packs, headlamps were on, and we were motoring up the trail. I’ll let the photos take it from here.

Morning light on Tahoma, the Mother of Waters.

On the approach. Just up and left of Erik is our descent, the NFNWR. We climbed the north ridge, the rocky line on the left.

Two climbers visible on the Adams Glacier (center-right).

Photo by Erik of me beginning the climb of the north ridge. I was surprised to discover later that most seem to find this route tedious. I thought it aesthetic, efficient, and atypical for a volcano climb. Perhaps the choss of the San Juan Mountains has given me a new perspective.

Erik cresting the summit plateau. I think this was the smelliest (sulfur) volcanic summit I’ve been on.

Erik dropping in on the NFNWR. The first few hundred feet off the summit were a perfect low angle warmup.

Check out Erik’s GoPro video of the descent here.

Erik exiting the face. We wove through the cliff bands in the upper right.

Lenticulars above the Adams icefall. The mountain was enveloped by clouds around 5 minutes later.

Thank you, Klickitat.

I camped again that night and made it back to my parent’s home in Wenatchee the next day. That night while digging through boxes in my childhood bedroom, I found an old journal. In it, 13-year-old me had written his goals down for 2010. Climb Dragontail, climb a v2, do a 360 on skis, among many other things that I’ve long since achieved. The last goal on the list, never crossed off, was to climb Mt. Adams. It took me 14 years, but I was finally able to check that one off the list. 13 year old me was proud.

A Week in the Elk Mountains

Since I moved to SW Colorado four years ago, the entirety of my skiing has been in the San Juans. On this so-gloriously-perfect third week of April, I ventured out with some friends to ski a handful of classic lines in Elk Mountains, such as the north face of Castle, Conundrum Couloir, the Pearl, and the Pyramid’s Real Banana. Enjoy the photos.

Scott Eubank en route to the Pearl (Cathedral Peak).

Scott climbing The Pearl.

Looking back at Cathedral Peak (right) from the summit of Leahy. The more distant, high peaks in the center are two 14ers, Castle and Conundrum, which we skied the next day.

Scott dropping in on the north face of Leahy - a nice bonus lap after the Pearl.

Approaching Pyramid peak in stormy conditions was seriously hardcore. There’s a lot of gated road you have to cover. I rode an e-bike, towing Scott. I have never been this wet in Colorado.

Psyche remained high nonetheless. Jenna Brown and Johnny Youngs.

The north face of North Maroon. A classic ski descent I will have to come back for.

Climbing ‘The Real Banana’. Full conditions.

Stoke is high in the steep and deep.

DROPPING

A Season of Spring Skiing in the San Juan Mountains

Or, my test-drive blog post.

I started skiing when I was 2. My approach to skiing has gone through a lot of different phases over all that time - from not really enjoying it at all, to being a wannabe racer, to just wanting to ski the backcountry, to being a park rat, a wannabe freerider, a Baker bro, a turns-all-year acolyte, to someone whose ski season doesn’t really start till April.

I’m still adjusting to the continental snowpack after moving to Colorado from the PNW four years ago. Ice climbing tends to fill my winters, though I did ski more powder in 2024 than other recent years, but those six weeks from the middle of April to the end of May are still my favorite six of the year.

After a month on a work assignment in Baja, my ski season began with a series of epic powder days on the Trout-to-Ophir tour, a popular shuttle mission in the NW San Juans.

ALT

Yours truly in Gemini (top). The Himalayan Face, always calling (lower).

After one T-to-O day, Dani made me take a picture with my photo of her in Backcountry Mag, and I’m quite glad she did.

One day skiing Gemini with Dani, I brought the drone along. Check out the video here.

Shortly thereafter, stuck again yearning for someone else to get into the mountains with, I did a solo mission, Trout-to-Ophir-and-back-to-Trout (nixing the shuttle option in favor of my own legs: the hermit’s choice, not the smart one). I skied the Big O, one of the more prominent couloirs in Waterfall Canyon, made some GS turns through hero hippy pow into the bottom of the canyon, and upon realizing it was too warm to stick with my original plan of climbing back up an adjacent couloir to regain the ridge and descend back to my car, I took the long way out, tracing Waterfall Creek through low angle but consistent terrain, safe from the warming slabs and cornices that would haunt me otherwise. Not safe from dehydration and sleep deprivation, which always hit me like a train those first couple warm spring days.

Hero turns upon exiting the Big O.

I regained the ridge at a new-to-me location on the west shoulder of Pilot Knob, with a steep, exposed, unknown face between me and my car. My “safer exit” suddenly was feeling much less safe. I had a lot of words that day to describe the position I found myself in, dropping in blind on a face that I knew deadends in cliffs for 95% of it’s width. Today, 3 months later in the middle of a record setting July heatwave, I don’t seem to have as many. I trusted my intuition, ski cut a windslab, and followed my gut down towards what I hoped would be a sneak line through the cliff band. It went, but barely - just a couple centimeters wider than my 184cm skis through it’s gut, I made almost 1000 feet of hop turns before exiting onto familiar below-treeline terrain and lovely cruise back to the car.

Is it gonna go?

It goes! We got lucky. The ‘Pilot Pinner’ is a couloir I would actually welcome skiing again.

Next stop, The Coors Face, on Shandoka (Wilson Peak). This line needs no introduction. For me, it had been the only line in the San Juans to ever turn me back, having attempted it 3 times in the previous year (wind slab, a late start, and a rocky, not-filled-in crux being the 3 reasons I bailed).

Three previous bails left me feeling stubborn, I guess, and Nick and I skied it in mediocre conditions that I would not repeat again. Of all the '50 Classics’ I’ve skied, this was by far the worst in the given conditions. An inch of sugar snow often covered large, lurking sharks. I blew out an edge on one of them. It was kinda scary, and not really in the calculated, controlled sort of way, more of the 'this is stupid’ kind of way. The crux was largely rock, and I booted a small section. I’m glad I did it, but it truly felt like checking a box, which is not the way I want any of my mountain experiences to feel. I would need a record setting snowpack to come back.

Nick on the thin face. Shark attack!

Once through the choke, the lower couloir and apron was phenomenal. I would ski that section any day.

Photo by Gus Bosch, who skied the line a couple days later. You can see my and Nick’s tracks in the central couloir, lower on the face.

After that, I racked up 30000 feet of vert in a week of skiing in the Elk Mountains. I skied a couple more San Juan classics too, such as the Naked Lady.

The last Colorado ski mission of the season was in the La Plata Mountains, whose western facade presides over Montezuma County and is a never ending source of beautiful sunset landscapes from the mesa above my house in Dolores. The small sub range of the San Juans offers incredible powder skiing in the winter (often receiving greater and wetter snow than other parts of the range, comparable in some ways to Wolf Creek Pass or Marble) and plethora of fantastic couloir descents, complicated only by long and difficult access. A sled helps. On this day we chose mountain bikes to cover 5 or 6 miles of singletrack before reaching snowline.

We skied a perfect north-facing couloir off of Spiller Peak, which I have heard referred to as Ray’s Couloir, though I’m also partial to 'The Spillway’. Owen Basin, the headwaters of the not-so-mighty yet vital Mancos River, was criss-crossed with bear tracks and packed with fun-looking ice climbs, and one incredibly good looking quartzite boulder. An inspiring amphitheater indeed.

Bear report, above treeline, all aspects: active.

Nick climbing the couloir. Dibe Ntsaa (Hesperus) and Lavendar Peaks behind. An inspiring mountain venue indeed, if only it were easier to get to.

3, 2, 1….

Baja, March 2024.

A selection of landscapes from an assignment with Hidden West Adventures, driving the length of Baja California and back. March 2024.