Gazing upon California’s rugged central coast from Highway 1 for the very first time this past week, my immediate thought was: I am a bad Californian. How have I lived here so long without ever visiting? In fairness, it’s a big state, and Big Sur is often foggy and not particularly easy to get to. […]
The great Al Preston and I took a short break from the chairlifts last weekend to ski Hollywood Chute, the modest but aesthetic diagonal cut through the Mammoth Crest headwall over McLeod Lake. With the road open all the way to Horseshoe Lake, access is ridiculously easy—a half-mile on-trail approach to McLeod Lake, where we […]
“It’s an angular/rotational leap rather than a vertical one” is my best 2026 compression for understanding both classic and modern Pedal-Hop steep skiing technique. I’m still working out how best to translate this, but I think I finally understand one of the great mysteries of the classic French Virage Sauté-Pédale (Pedal-Hop turn): “Do you lean […]
Typically, when we get to the top of a mountain, we are excited at the prospect of skiing down. Dynastar’s Pierra Menta inverts that equation: the exciting part is the climb. I purchased the Pierra Menta with a very specific spring-skiing job in mind: long, hideous, abominably-dry approaches where I’d be forced to endlessly carry […]
Looking back at my records, I see the last time I visited San Gorgonio was May 2020, which means it took me exactly six years to forget how awful the approach is. In any case, I have definitely refreshed my memory! Al and I Gorgonioed yesterday, starting at the South Fork trailhead off Jenks Lake […]
The vibe at Mammoth has been a little off this year—so I’ve heard, and so it seems to me from my few visits. In addition of course to the weather, the big difference is apparently people. Because so many western resorts have had such a poor snow year, Mammoth has apparently been getting a lot […]
As you might expect there are a lot of ‘silver’ mountains in Colorado, but for our purposes this is 13,470′ Silver Mountain (aka Silver B) that towers over Ophir, and forms the massif that includes Telluride’s Palmyra Peak. We skied this right from the summit, descending the peak’s NE couloir into Lena Basin. And the […]
Don’t tell the San Gabriels, but wow is it easy to get stunning video in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains—you can just point your camera in any direction and the range pretty much does the rest. This is Mount Emma, 13,581′ high, one of Colorado’s “Bicentennial” peaks—#197 or #194 depending on your prominence preferences—possibly named after […]
The pain woke me at one a.m. and I knew immediately there was no way I was going back to sleep. I’d been trying to keep track of how much Tylenol and Advil I’d been taking—writing it down—but I’d given up. I didn’t want to know how far beyond the 24-hour limit I was. All […]
In so many ways, it is hard to keep up with the pace of change right now. A week ago we had mountains buried in snow across Southern California; now we have a staggering February whiplash melt. If that’s not enough velocity for you, Angeles National Forest officials have apparently decided to terminate winter mountaineering […]