Jim Dockery
Well-Known Member
My regular partner, Eric, and I had a wonderful day of back-country skiing near Stevens Pass yesterday. It has snowed about a foot in the last week and stayed cold (which is rare here in western WA) so it was still good powder even though the sun came out at times. More incredible was having the mountain to ourselves and skiing uncut snow all day. This type of skiing has been getting more popular for years and the pandemic has just made it crazy - harder and harder to find untracked snow - which is easier and more beautiful to ski. We felt like we were in a time-machine dream back 20 years. Luckily we can both still get up there and cut it up. I did go to bed at around 8 and woke up at 7 today!
Eric enjoys sweet snow on the first run of the day. I did give him a hard time about the dull color of his new jacket.
Eric got this at the bottom of our first run - we stop once we hit the thicker trees, put the skins on our skis, and climb back up the open slopes for another run. At the end of the day there is a gully we ski down through those trees with some difficulty (the snow gets much worse the lower you go).
The money shot. We worked together to set up this up off the top of our 4th run. Eric shot it with his iPhone. Clouds were coming and going, so we waited a few minutes. Finally he gave me the go ahead and I pushed off only to be stopped with a shout a few feet down - he had the camera settings wrong. I had to climb back up so that I would have the speed to crank a good turn in the right place, then we had to wait for better light again. We airdropped pictures at the end of the day and I edited this in ACR this morning.
Eric enjoys sweet snow on the first run of the day. I did give him a hard time about the dull color of his new jacket.
Eric got this at the bottom of our first run - we stop once we hit the thicker trees, put the skins on our skis, and climb back up the open slopes for another run. At the end of the day there is a gully we ski down through those trees with some difficulty (the snow gets much worse the lower you go).
The money shot. We worked together to set up this up off the top of our 4th run. Eric shot it with his iPhone. Clouds were coming and going, so we waited a few minutes. Finally he gave me the go ahead and I pushed off only to be stopped with a shout a few feet down - he had the camera settings wrong. I had to climb back up so that I would have the speed to crank a good turn in the right place, then we had to wait for better light again. We airdropped pictures at the end of the day and I edited this in ACR this morning.
