Altarondacks — Episode 2

By:  Peter
March 28, 2011


The next day the sun shone brightly again and the warm temps returned.  Our friend Nick joined us for another adventure above tree line.  With abundant sunshine, long daylight hours, and a forecasted clear night with a bright full moon, we decided to push it on this day.  We had light and weather to spare.

Wasting no time Nick dropped off our first summit of the day, ripping apart a slight sun crust to expose a thick base of creamy corn. Mmmmmm, corn.

Nick doesn’t subscribe to the modern phatter=better dogma of ski design.  One might think that his skinny rando sticks would get mired in all that creamy goodness,  but he solves this issue by skiing the air a few inches above the snow.

As long as he just hovers there it’s no problem

Every once in awhile he would touch down and crank a turn, just to prove he could.  There were large gaps of nothing in the tracks he left on that mountain face.

Jessie has a very different attitude towards skis (phatter=mine!) and turning

Here she is arcing so hard she scared the corn back into pow.

With that line thoroughly demolished, we moved on to summit #2 for the day.  We had looked at this line from afar a lot during the week.   We knew that the entrance would be a bit “cruxy”.  Here’s Nick pointing ‘em to get it done.

And into turn#1 on a big blank canvas of “Western” corn.  I didn’t see Nick again until the bottom of the run.

Jessie went retro with her entrance moves, pulling out some old school pedal-hop turns, before slarving down that big open face.  Like Nick, she didn’t wait, but instead just opened it up all the way to the bottom.

From there we re-skinned and headed to summit #3 for the day.  The sun at this point had obviously cooked my brain, because I proceeded to lead Jessie and Nick on an “awesome” hour-long boondoggle.  I believe the locals call this a “Dak-Schwack”, and from what I hear we didn’t even do an especially bad one.  I’ll spare you the photos of us eating pine needles to survive, and skip right to our third descent of the day.  As the sun had started to go down, the light went flat, and the corn started to firm up for the night.   Finally, Nick and Jessie were willing to let me run one out to bottom ahead of them.   See ya!

Several hours later we were still making our way back to the truck as that beautiful moon came up and lit our way.  No headlamps needed, plan accomplished.  We wrapped up an excellent first trip “Out West” and drove to the ferry to take us home to our Green Mountains for a few more days of skiing back home.

Thanks for checking out FIS! Want some more from Pete’s western trip? Check out Episode 1.

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Read about the author:   Peter
Enjoy this TR? Read another: HIKE WEEK! Carried (Away) Up the Trap Dike

Related Stuff:

  1. Altarondacks — Episode 1
  2. TR: Altarondacks — Episode 1
  3. TR: Altarondacks — Episode 2
  4. TR: Altarondacks — Episode 3
  5. Altarondacks — Episode 3
  6. Famous Internet Gear Guide 2012-2013: Episode I

One Comments

  1. savantskis
    wrote on March 29th, 2011 at 10:10 am  
    1

    looks like a sweet few days thanks for the TR

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