Breakfast at the Heidelberg was typical of this region: coffee, tea, good bread, cold cuts, and cereal if meat wasn’t your thing. Today we head to the Jamtal Hut on the Silvretta Traverse. Thermos filling was done from the tea water tank. I mixed up a liter of Cytomax, kept my Rittersport chocolate at the top of my pack, and off we went on a well beaten skin track heading southerly to the high Alps.

Is slogging up a ski area for five hours the way to start a classic ski tour in the Alps? No. So day one or our Silvretta adventure involved a few ski lifts, which then morphed to an easy short tour leading to the Heidelberger Hutte.

Ok, on the road headed for Austria, Switzerland where we’ll backcountry ski the Silvretta Traverwse! Drove over to Boulder yesterday afternoon and visited Brian Litz, co-founder of Backcountry Magazine and general man about the Colorado mountains. Got together with him, Gordon Banks, Pam Rice and Chris Webster for some of that Littelton Mexican food Brian kept promising. Pam and Chris got Capitol Peak skied last year. Chris only has two 14ers to go to have skied them all, and Pam has just over a dozen more to be the FIRST WOMAN to lay tracks on every 14,000-foot peak in Colorado!

Marble, CO backcountry skiing, Black Diamond Verdict and Dynafit Manaslu skis for backcountry skiing

Ski descent of Castle Peak east face, Elk Mountains Colorado.

With all the fatal avalanches we’ve seen this season, a good chunk of them at resorts, there is renewed awareness that skiing inbounds doesn’t guarantee 100% safety. Patrollers do a great job keeping our resorts controlled, but avalanches don’t play by the rules. And while my ski crew is always safe and takes precautions, getting my AIARE Level 1 avalanche certification was in order so that I could make good decisions when skiing – either in the Bowl or in the backcountry – without relying on others to make those decisions for me.