Backcountry skiing news.
This just in, Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association proposes grooming winter snow trail for fat tire mountain bikes. Grooming snow trails for bicycling? Who knew! The thought occurs to me, don’t mountain athletes in CB have enough to do in winter?
Press release, condensed:
Gunnison, Colorado, USA, October 20, 2016 – The Gunnison Ranger District is providing the opportunity for public comment on the proposal to groom 37.3 miles around Crested Butte, in Gunnison County, Colorado for multiple winter uses, including bicycling, skiing and snowshoeing. The Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association (CBMBA) is proposing to groom 9.4 miles surrounding Mt. Crested Butte, including: North Village; Woods and Crusader trails at Crested Butte Mountain Resort; and CR 317 to the Gothic town-site. The proposal includes 9.9 miles of single-track grooming in the Brush Creek drainage. CBMBA also proposes 18 miles of grooming in the Cement Creek drainage. All proposed areas will remain open to multiple use as designated under the 1995 and 2005 environmental decisions. Proposed grooming will provide a recreation amenity all users can enjoy…Comment online at http://www.fs.usda.gov/goto/GroomingComments.
Yes everyone, ski touring is still exploding in popularity. If you’re entirely new to the game you’ve landed in the right place, here at WildSnow you can search for information in numerous ways. If you’re so fresh you don’t exactly know what to look for, yet you enjoy reading and want to learn, I’d suggest simply paging through all our blog posts beginning with our earliest. You’ll skip many, but you will land on gems that even myself in all my exuberant brain power, has forgotten are there. Begin the basic process of “reading the whole site” by clicking the “All Posts Listed” option in the “Articles & Posts” navigation menu item above. Or use this link.
While reading, enjoy our literally thousands of blog comments. Thanks to a crew of friendly well spoken “WildSnowers” our comment threads might be the best of any ski website you can find. Trust me, you will be enlightened. And please be comfortable posting a comment yourself. We are here to help and we work hard to keep our forums civil, family friendly and on-topic.
Getting children started with backcountry skiing also comes in along the lines of being “new.” We’ve got lots of take on that, just click here. Beyond our own content, a bit of web browsing always brings up fun content about skiing with progeny. Today I landed on this article with a distinctly “European” take on the matter.
Any of you ski touring vets noticed the “mainstream” media fascination with what used to be our own personal fringe sport? I doubt that’ll stop any time soon, what with how backcountry skiing can combine so many elements of a good story. Danger. Food. Relationships. Athletics. Skill. Lack of skill. Gear. Machinery. It’s all there. History, too. Indeed, worldwide, quite a few of the ski lodges and huts still in use played a part in the birth of modern skiing. For example, in 1929 Assiniboine Lodge became the first backcountry ski lodge in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, when ski instructor and guide Erling Strom brought his first group of clients there for a snow adventure. Nice Assiniboine article here.
If you like ski history, check out this capsule of the Assiniboine story.
Side note: Communicating the sport of backcountry skiing can be as confusing as explaining NFL football to a Martian. The common encompassing term for human powered skiing, especially in Europe, is “ski touring.” Problem is that here in North America, many people define ski touring as shuffling or skating around on relativly flat ground, usually without climbing skins. When the terrain tilts up, we tend to call it “backcountry skiing” or “ski mountaineering.” Then we have ski mountaineering racing to confuse the issue, known as “skimo” to some. The dance of language will clearly never end. Here at WildSnow, we seem to trend ever more to the term “ski touring” but we still like “backcountry skiing” since as wilderness loving North American’s we see a rather distinct difference between skiing on prepared trails (resort uphilling or skate tracks) as opposed to breaking our way through wild snow.
Speaking of skimo, I like the visuals in this video. Many of you know who Mathéo Jacquemoud & Kilian Jornet Burgada are. They ski through the mountains so fast it’s certain they are genetically modified. Jackqemoud has an interesting history with it all, Jornet narrates.
JACQUEMOUD | Fall and Rise from FRAME Visuals on Vimeo.
WildSnow climate change watch: Oh la la, the issue of geoengineering won’t die. We accidentally engineered more heat, is it time to deliberately engineer our way to cooler air? Interesting writing on the subject from the NYT.
Clearly, many if not most radical environmentalists morally equate geo-engineering with, for example, murder. On a less fanatical level, most thinking individuals are not entirely comfortable with the idea. If nothing else, I’d think the law of unintended consequences would have an automatic top-flight presence in any such scheme. Yet one has to wonder, if the planet warms to the point of catastrophe (defined here as no-more-skiing or the NMS level of GW), is not doing something better than doing nothing? And what if global warming causes extinction of species? Is it not our job to stop it, just as it’s apparently our job to re-introduce species, which is obviously a form of environmental engineering intended to compensate for our human influences? Important stuff.
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
