Sweet Lines on Elkhorn Mountain

Elkhorn Mountain is the 22nd highest peak in Oregon. We found some sweet Lines, and great snow up there.

Silver Creek Basin

A great day exploring my favorite basin with Matt Primomo, a Colorado Front Range Split Boarder, mountaineering guide and aspiring avalanche forecaster. We climbed to the western flanking ridge of Silver Creek basin and skied some awesome gullies and tree shots down into the bottom of silver creek. The best run was a 1,200 vert tree shot descending from alpine ridgetop, to mixed openly spaced Whitebark Pine and Subalpine Fir, down into dense Grand Fir and Engelman Spruce. The Silver creek ditch amazes me almost everytime I see it. Our predecessors went to alot of work to practically make water flow uphill from Silver creek in the Lostine Drainage, over into the Alder Slope Ditch. I look forward to exploring this basin more.

WAH guided trip in Mcully Basin

I got a unique opportunity to shadow Morgan "Jedi Master" Jenkins on a recent Wallowa Alpine Huts hosted and catered ski trip in Mcully Basin, in the eastern Eagle Cap Wilderness. It was a great opportunity to explore the Basin With some awesome guest and great guides.

WAH Staff Trip

Had a great time with some great people over in the Wallowa Alpine Huts "Norway Camp," for the 2010 staff training trip.

Wallowa Alpine Huts

So I haven't posted on here for a while, because I haven't had a camera, and a blog without pictures is lame. But hear are some pictures from Wallowa Alpine Hut's camp in Norway Basin, accessed from Halfway, Oregon. The boss CB and I went in there for a few days to do some pre-season prep work (and grab some turns of course).

Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic

For most people who run the "classic," it represents the single event around which everything revolves. Stay up to late partying on a sunday night, and your 2 hours of sleep become "sleep deprivation practice" for the classic. Not much else could make me subject myself to rediculous hardships, like not eating for three days, running 14 miles every day after work for 2 months, limiting myself to 4 hours of sleep a night while working a full time job, packrafting 15 miles of the kenai river at midnight every day for a week, swimming in glacier lakes to the point of hypothermia almost daily, skiing every day off all summer long, and the list goes on and on.... The point is that running the classic feels like the one thing that every thing I have ever done was in preperation for.

I would love to tell my partner Craig "chunk" Barnard and I's story here, but a link to Roman Dial's race report can tell the story better:

http://packrafting.blogspot.com/2009/08/wilderness-classic-report-unofficial.html

National Geographic 'adventururer of the year' Andrew Skurka did a great writeup for Backpacking light Magazine as well:

http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/race_report_2009_amwc.html?id=ZNBuBXJH:209.124.128.160

After work Backcountry shortlapping

Heres a few pictures from back in june, when I only had to bushwack for 1.5 hours for excellent skiing (excellent being a very relative term here) in the Chugach national forest.

Here is me adopting the "sticky volcanic ash on top of snow" stance.

Bushwacking home at midnight after 3 solid 800 vert laps after a full day of work (with work the next day nonetheless)