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Skiing & Snowboarding

Almost 60 years after the last chair went up the mountain at Pioneer, my husband and I weren’t sure what to expect when we drove up Cement Creek on a cloudy Saturday afternoon in February. We read about Pioneer in a handy book, “Powder Ghost Towns: Epic Backcountry Runs In Colorado’s Lost Ski Resorts” (Peter Bronski, Wilderness Press), and picked it as our first foray into the backcountry.

I bought “Powder Ghost Towns” a couple of years ago, with the expressed purpose of getting us off the resorts. Alpine skiers with many years of experience, we started telemarking just a few years ago, mostly hiking up resort runs and skiing down. Neither of us is exceptionally competent, but we are game.

I thought that our first backcountry destination would be the old Stoner Ski Area, a little hill between Rico and Dolores, Colorado, that closed in 1983. Stoner is were my dad learned to ski - on opening day in 1948. Stoner was operated by the Sky-Hi Ski Club and when my dad was a mere pre-teen, he joined their board of directors. If there is anyplace in Colorado that I have wanted to ski for nostalgic and sentimental reasons, it is Stoner.

Ski Film

The movie was advertised as dreadful, probably the worst skiing movie ever made. And after a viewing on Saturday evening at the Denver’s Film Society, that seems a fair description of the star-starved “Snowbeast.” While some reviewers have tried to find redeeming value, this reviewer could only find solace in seeing Crested Butte, where the movie was filmed.

A made-for-television horror film, apparently modeled on “Jaws,” it was first broadcast in 1977. The plot featured a certain Rill Lodge and Ski Resort, where a 50th Annual Winter Carnival was under way, as well as a thin love triangle, an aging Olympic skier coping with his post-skiing mission in life and then… missing skiers.

Snowmobiling

In an old, rustic building on the edge of national forest land is Trailblazer Snowmobile Tours, a Fraser, Colorado, company owned by Greg Foley.

At the start of a ride with Foley, he tells us what we are getting into. Trailblazer has a permit to ride on 120 miles in the St Louis Creek/Arapaho National Forest, the largest track of land permitted to a local business. The permits issued in the 1980s allow access into rolling hills in this north-central area of Colorado open up deep forests and wide valleys. This is closest snowmobiling outfit to the Denver area.

On a bluebird, Colorado afternoon a group of Winter Park and Fraser locals head out on a two-hour tour.

Trailblazer’s fleet of new Arctic Cat and Yamaha 4-stroke snowmobiles are perfect for this ride, but Foley lets us ride his new fleet of Phazers, powerful high-performance machines.

Obscure Winter Sports

It was 11 degrees on a Sunday morning in Missoula, Montana. While most of the town was still at home, tucked in bed or sipping coffee, I got up and headed to the Glacier Ice Rink at 9 to find myself some curlers. It turns out a few dozen dedicated members of the Missoula Curling Club sliding were already there, sliding enormous rocks and sweeping the ice. The brand-new curling club practices and plays matches at odd hours on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings to work around hockey schedules.

After watching for a bit and trying to discern what on earth was going on, I introduced myself to Meredith Stewart, an eight-year curling veteran. Stewart, a freshman at the University of Montana, has been curling since she was a fourth-grader in Duluth, Minnesota. She read about the new Missoula league, so every weekend since January, Stewart gets on the ice to practice and play. She explained some of the rules to me.

Skiing & Snowboarding

During past seasons, if skiers and snowboarders from southeast Wyoming wanted to ride or ski a terrain park, they had to travel hundreds of miles to resorts rather than stay at home at Snowy Range, a ski area located roughly 30 miles west of Laramie. But this season, that’s all changed.

“As far as the last few years go, whenever I was here they would just stick a rail in the ground, put a bump up to it and call that a jump,” Snowy Range Ski Area Terrain Park Manager Erik Clark said.

Since the park was built late in December, local boarders and skiers have five different rails of varying types and two different jumps--one large, one small--to ride at Snowy Range. 

Clark said that the move to design, build and maintain the new terrain park came as the result of meeting the demands of members of the local skiing and snowboarding community.

Skiing & Snowboarding

New West’s Snow Blog recently ran a post about a skiing/snowboarding tragedy at Wyoming’s Hogadon Ski Area. On Dec. 24, a young male snowboarder plowed into a mom and daughter who were stopped on a run. He was killed, as was the 5-year-old daughter. The mom was injured.

Aside from describing the facts of the incident, the article attracted a number of interesting comments. Almost every comment contained a similar theme: When you are skiing or riding, you are not alone. You have to pay attention to your surroundings and others on the slopes. Slow down and ski defensively. A matter of personal safety? Definitely. A matter of good manners? That, too.

Etiquette is commonly defined as a “code of behavior that delineates expectations for social behavior according to conventional norms within a society, class or group” (Wikipedia). When we participate in skiing and riding at a resort, or even in the backcountry, we are participating as part of a common group in an common activity.

My guess is that most everyone already knows the Skier Responsibility Code, or at least thinks they do, but a refresher is always good. So here goes: 

From Adventure Journal

It’s nice to see Salomon Freeski TV branching out from simply glorifying its athletes to telling stories about just folks, in this case a handful of silver hairs who still roll to the hill in Toyota picks, hike for their turns and bang off 100-plus days a year. Good times, good times.

SNOWBLOG

Everyone who skis, snowboards or breathes knows about Vail, Aspen, Breckenridge. Drill a little deeper and most will also pull out Jackson, Big Sky, Park City, Alta, Sun Valley, Keystone. We’ve got those big hitters in our inclusive map of ski areas throughout the Rocky Mountain West (Colorado, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, New Mexico). But we’ve also got the details and coordinates on the lesser-known, affordable spots, including Bear Paw in Montana, where you can score a lift ticket for a mere 20 bucks, and Ski Hesperus in southwestern Colorado, where you can ski under stars without the crowds or the hassles.

Ski Resort News

While working on this technology, Leitner Lifts recognized the process could be reversed and used to create direct-drive wind turbines. In essence, the direct drive allows the generator to turn at the same speed as the turbine blades, eliminating more than one-half of the rotating components in the mechanism and, possibly, one-half of the potential headaches.

Leitwind has primarily focused its wind-turbine installations in Europe and India and is just beginning in North America from Colorado. Highly efficient, but of a relatively small-scale, the Leitwind turbines range in power from 1.5 megawatts to 3.0 megawatts, enough to offset the energy consumption of between 400 and 800 homes. These are not the type of turbines that would populate a big wind farm. Rather, the Leitwind turbines are appropriate for use by individual companies and communities looking to supplement their local power supply with green energy. And, of course, they are appropriate for ski areas.

Resort News

The story of the Bitterroot Resort has become one of the tall tales of the west.

For decades, rumors have circulated about a possible alpine ski resort, larger than any in North America, with a vertical decent of 5,555 feet, greater than Jackson Hole, Big Sky and Heavenly Valley, Calif.

Towering south of Missoula, Mont., Lolo Peak, with its ravines that hold snow until late August, has remained the white whale of possible ski resorts. Tom McClay’s epic plan would reportedly generate up to 1,200 jobs and countless tourism dollars for Missoula.

But for now, the fabled Bitterroot Resort remains a modern ghost town marked by a series of unused ski runs cut into one of the lower mountains nearby.

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