Backcountry snowboarding in East Vail

Tuesday Jan 8 I endangered my life again :) well I guess I endanger my life just about every day with all this snowboarding (Health Insurance, very important!) Later that evening, relaxing our tired muscles in the spa, Gooch & I were discussing whether the day's activities were more dangerous than standing on the cliff edges of Canyonlands; we both agreed it was. It was probably the most dangerous thing I've done since surfing in a cyclonic swell when I was 19 (which is at the top of my list of dangerous stunts).

On Monday I was hunting a new toe strap to replace the one I broke on Sunday & getting my board waxed when Gooch called to say the next day he and 2 other friends were planning to go backcountry skiing in East Vail. It was forecast to snow overnight & through the next day, and while I knew it would be good, I was honestly apprehensive, as there were a couple of locals who were killed last season by avalanches out there, and I'd never gone backcountry skiing.
But it didn't rank so high on my insane-o-meter to rule it out, and as I'm usually down for doing something once to say I did it, I agreed.

So these guys were hard core skiers and it was going to be an epic day, Gooch brought his DVD-quality video recorder (full size camera weighs several kg, he rides with it in the front of his jacket). One of the guys, Danny, isn't afraid to jump cliffs and as Gooch best described him, "he always makes the highlight reel". The other guy Matt is a safety nut (a nice balancing force when paired with Danny) and he also hits some cliffs. Gooch is a great skier but he doesn't shoot the cliffs. So in the morning I went with these guys and a few of their relatives skiing around in-bounds Vail and they took me on half a dozen runs I'd never done, it was pretty hard going for me because they aren't used to snowboarders and don't know where to stop. They kept leaving me behind after the lifts and stopping on flat areas where I couldn't get going again, so I was half exhausted by midday and kind of frustrated despite the incredible powder conditions and the few great new runs I'd added to my list.

After a peanut butter sandwich and jelly worm lunch we left the others behind and headed out the China Bowl over to the T-bar that is used to access the Mongolia Bowls and East Vail. It was the second time I'd ever been on a T-bar, first time being with my brother Andy in Thredbo where I fell, knocking Andy over and proceeding to get dragged a couple meters by the T-bar before rolling out of the way, all of that with a hundred spectators in queue :) This time was much better, one stumble, but no falls. We'd been skiing all day with backpacks, so at the top of the T-bar we drank some water, shed our jackets to our base layers as quickly as possible in the howling wind and blowing snow and strapped on our avalanche beacons, made sure our shovels & packs were secure, and tested the avi beacons on each other. The beacons have 2 modes, transmit (used most of the time) and receive (used if you're trying to locate someone buried in an avalanche). They are nifty devices, beeping faster as you get closer to a transmit signal, with arrows and estimated distances on the display. Danny was reassuring when he said they're important, but often only useful for body retrieval. From the T-bar it's a 15-20min hike up and around to the summit of that particular mountain (don't know if it's named), which was a brief but tough hike. Aside from being at about 11 200+ ft of elevation, the wind was blowing me around carrying my snowboard, feet slipping and sinking into the walked-out snow trail...I looked behind at Gooch following about 30ft away, visible through the blowing snow, looking like a scene from the documentary on climbing Mt Everest! Breathing hard, face wind and snow blasted red, I arrived at the ridge summit, the ski area boundary manifested as a series of wood poles and orange cord lining the ridge to my left, with a gap that was the gate out to official backcountry.

We drank some more water & rested behind some tiny pine trees. Gooch & I being East Vail first-timers, we were very quiet, mentally preparing for what might happen that afternoon while Matt and Danny chatted away about equipment & conditions. As the trade winds blow almost exclusively from the west, west-facing slopes at high elevation usually have a fairly shallow, crusty and icy snowpack, and large cornices can form on the east side of ridgelines. So our first challenge was to find a safe way down into the bowl that was just out of sight below us to the left, and we slowly slid down the ridge keeping well away from the edge until we could see the edge of the trees below. Danny & Matt went and peered over and was satisfied that he'd found the line they'd taken before, relatively safe from avalanches being next to trees and not out in the open. We all agreed, then Danny took the first plunge; we all held our breath as he did it, because cornice drops are a common avalanche trigger. Danny made a half dozen turns and we relaxed, and we could tell it was amazing before he called back in pure exhilaration. The initial pitch was very steep, 50 to 60 degrees; I went third and took my first turns into the best snow of my life!

On this first drop Matt & I went down into a tree area a little further below Gooch & Danny, only to discover after a little exploring that we were surrounded by cliffs, or as Danny put it, 'mandatory air'. I knew that cliffs were in this bowl but I was assured by the guys that there were ways down around the cliffs, so I was slightly angry and very foreboding that I'd got into this position after my first drop. I contemplated a cliff jump, but when Danny went to the side and said the cliff was too high (about 30ft) and I could see the tops of pine trees below me I unstrapped and began climbing out. It was an exhausting ordeal; when I stood with a straight leg, my feet sunk till my weight was supported by my waist. Shoving my snowboard vertically halfway into the snow above me, and pulling myself up the incline with my knees and legs spread out scrambling for maximum surface area, foot by foot I pulled myself up 25ft to Gooch's level which looked stable. It took me 20 mins. Meanwhile Matt tried to find a way over the cliff and discovered to our right was the part they usually go down where there is no cliff. As I climbed up I was startled when my left foot, which was on the mountain side, not the cliff, sunk through snow into air, and I found out I was on a wall of snow known as a well. Tree wells and cliff wells are risky for skiers, as they can contain super-soft snow that you can sink into like quicksand and in some cases suffocate, because they are sheltered from forces that firm and pack snow, such as wind and the sun. I looked and saw the wall of rock next to me but not the bottom of the well, so I just carefully climbed the hell out of there. When I got up to where Gooch was standing, I found the reason for the stability was that he stood atop a buried pine tree. I basically sat between the couple of branches sticking out of the snow to strap on my board, wondering just how deep the snow was in this area.

That was the end of the major dramas though, and the rest of the run was a series of unparalleled drops, perfection, everyone taking turns filming and being filmed. Danny found a cliff with a soft looking landing and attempted a front flip for the camera; great footage for the ski movie Gooch and Danny put together each year. I rode through 100% virgin snow, thigh deep at speed, so soft some turns sent snow flying into my face (skiers affectionately call them face shots), so steep I rode through the slides of my previous turn, it was amazing. The bowl we were in seemed to stretch on forever in the closed-in weather; we were on the right hand side and could barely see the left treeline for snow, and it drops in a series of pitches, steep followed by almost flat, followed by another steep with scattered cliffs and then more flat, about 3 or 4 times over. As we descended the scale of the bowl became apparent, the ridge out of sight far above us, the drainage and tree-filled base just becoming visible over a thousand feet below us. Being part way down the bowl was an ominous place to be, as the risk of avalanche is ever present and could be triggered by something other than you; I could easily imagine an avalanche cloud bursting over the cliffs above me into the air in the open space to our left. Only a few small pines struggled to grow in the open space, a sure sign of an area that frequently slides. Still, being in the trees or on the edge of the trees is the safest place to be there; in the event of a slide, head into the trees as fast as possible.

After a fair bit of filming we decided to get going and enjoy the run, and we started skiing all together for 50m or so at a time; Danny jumped an icefall only realizing after the fact, it would have made an awesome photo, with the blue and brown ice covering parts of the cliff. The afternoon wore on and we got out at about 4:15pm; over 3 hours spent on one run! The bottom becomes a traverse through trees and then some of the East Vail neighbourhood down to a stop on the bus route. We were all stoked about the conditions, for me definitely the best of my life to date, and possibly ever.

We were lucky though, as I later found from Gooch that Matt and Danny returned the next day, conditions still snowing, to find that the snow was TOO deep, so deep that even the steepest pitches they had to straight-line to pick up any speed, our tracks from the previous day were all but gone, and they ploughed to a stop on the flatter pitches. Twice they nearly suffocated after jumping a cliff only to nearly disappear in the snow at the base, and walking through the flatter pitches snow was exhausting; poles were useless. Even without any stops for filming, they entered the bowl around noon, and didn't get out until 5:45pm; they were skiing out the trees and the neighbourhood in near total dark to get to the bus stop.

So that was my back country experience; been there done that, not something I'm likely to do many times in my life, if I ever do again. I can understand the lure of the backcountry, the perfect snow, the remoteness and sense of being surrounded in nature. But it comes with a high risk, avalanche deaths are above average this season and last season in Colorado, and those who have seen a major avalanche describe them as the most fearsome force of nature they've ever witnessed. If you're not killed by the impact of the cloud of falling snow, you quickly become immersed in a slosh of snow, and sink with other heavy objects like branches and trees towards the bottom of the cloud, trying to swim until the snow settles into a concrete-like tomb of hard packed snow and ice. Even those caught in minor slides of less than a hundred yards, buried to their waist find it a terrifying experience, sometimes unable to dig themselves out with just hands.

Compared to that, I'd take being held under a large wave in the surf any day.