CO Wilderness…
After a few resort days at Breck I headed up into the wilderness with my uncle and his crew of tele-skiers.
A six mile climb in to the Fritz Hut in the Aspen Backcountry required a split board - a snowboard that comes apart straight down the middle to turn into skis – with skins attached to the bottom of the skis for ‘non-slip’ climbing, and a free heel, this two planked device allows access to some insane terrain and can be turned back into a snowboard when it’s time to descend…
Climbing on the split board... (Dorky Photo Commentary: This image was created using sixteen horizantal frames shot at 17mm on a Canon 5D - Photoshop's automated photomerge feature (version CS3 and up) allows for quick and easy stitching of virtually any number of aligned photographs. Try it out! (file>automate>photomerge).
'Hut living' was awesome - with seven of us in the hut we all carried in food for one dinner and one breakfast for the whole crew. This photo is of my Uncle Lenny cooking up his breakfast.
Each morning a plan was devised to get us to the goods - this shot's of Lenny, Bob, and Blake checking out the topo-map to see what the day would bring.
- Uncle Lenny getting 'the goods' -
- The Crew Scouting for descents -
Lenny, Nate and I had broken off from the big crew and the three of us were in pretty deep on this one. After dropping in on an insane run a few miles from our hut we had begun our climb out, and the chest deep snow that was perfect on the way down was proving that we bit off more than we could chew on the way up. At this point, we were revising our plan to head straight up, and began cruising out to a drainage that would allow us access to the ridge we had dropped from. This plan added hours to our trip, and with daylight thinning, the situation became pretty spooky. After losing our track in the dark a handful of times, we finally arrived back at our hut at around 9 PM - I liked this photo because it was definitely the "Oh Shit" moment...
