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Western Montana Backcountry Ski Guide
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggereLunghezza: 189 pagine59 minuti
- Editore:
- Jeff Schmerker
- Pubblicato:
- Feb 9, 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781370656165
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
The first definitive guide to backcountry skiing in western Montana. Includes information on 109 ski tours as well as 125 photos and covers tours in the Bitterroot, Rattlesnake, Reservation, Sapphire, Mission, Swan, Scapegoat, Clearwater, Rocky, Cabinet, Purcell, Flint Creek, Pioneer, Pintlar, and Beaverhead mountains.
Informazioni sul libro
Western Montana Backcountry Ski Guide
Lunghezza: 189 pagine59 minuti
Descrizione
The first definitive guide to backcountry skiing in western Montana. Includes information on 109 ski tours as well as 125 photos and covers tours in the Bitterroot, Rattlesnake, Reservation, Sapphire, Mission, Swan, Scapegoat, Clearwater, Rocky, Cabinet, Purcell, Flint Creek, Pioneer, Pintlar, and Beaverhead mountains.
- Editore:
- Jeff Schmerker
- Pubblicato:
- Feb 9, 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781370656165
- Formato:
- Libro
Informazioni sull'autore
Jeff Schmerker lives in Missoula, Montana.
Correlati a Western Montana Backcountry Ski Guide
Anteprima del libro
Western Montana Backcountry Ski Guide - Jeff Schmerker
Introduction
Lots of good trips start out with this view. 6 a.m. on the road to Hamilton.
This guide covers backcountry skiing opportunities in Western Montana
– and what gets called western
in this case is being arbitrarily defined as the landscape west of Interstate 15. Ski terrain is arranged somewhat haphazardly by passes, ranges, or semi-ambiguous zones. Some small areas get a lot of detail and some huge areas get barely a mention. Also note that there are a handful of areas described just over the state line in Idaho. (I know that technically this is cheating, but they are only reasonably accessible from Montana.)
The ski opportunities described here are based on personal first-hand experience. Ski terrain in Western Montana is unique in that each snow storm, dry spell, and thaw opens or closes what is reasonably attainable by a normal skier. It would take a lifetime to ski it all, but I had to start somewhere, so here we are.
Individual entries get a brief overview, description of access, hints about ascent and descent routes, elevations you’re likely to start and end at, and an approximate amount of time you can expect to spend getting from your vehicle to something you might want to ski – i.e., the time period listed for each entry is basically for climbing only. I realize the elephant in the room here is the lack of maps. There are several reasons why no maps are included but I won’t bore you with them; hopefully you will use this guide with detailed maps to plan out your day before you leave home.
No gapers here. Cooper at Snowbowl.
Chapter 2: Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge that he, too, is kinda uneasy about guide books. Look – there are lots of places in this world ruined because too many people show up at the same time, led there by a dumb guide book. But let’s be honest – the Bitterroot Valley is not going to become the Wasatch Front any time soon, and hiking up Camas Point is not as easy as showing up at the Louvre with a guidebook and a Big Mac – you still need to get yourself up to the mountain, and that’s enough to turn most people away. More importantly, most of these places we cherish are on public lands, and the protection of those lands is only as good as the will of Congress – and there are a lot of people in Congress today who would like to see those public lands auctioned off. It’s hard to love a place and fight for it if you’ve never been to it, and so this author would like to acknowledge that to a large degree he thinks more people in the backcountry is better than less people in the backcountry.
The author would also like to acknowledge that he is just not that into snowmobiles. That is not to say the author is anti-snowmobile
, as he would gladly take one off your hands if you are giving it away and has never to his knowledge turned down a helpful ride from a passing ‘biler. However, the author would like to further acknowledge that not using snowmobiles creates a kind of a conundrum in Western Montana because, honestly, there is a lot of really freaking great terrain that only the long-term unemployed have enough time to hike to. This is backcountry skiing in Western Montana: you struggle all day up an unforgiving mountainside only to get to the top and see that you are the edge of an infinite sea of mountains. If you had a snowmobile, you could be that much further into that infinite sea. However, there are two things here that the author will say: (a) most backcountry skiers don’t use snowmobiles and (b) snowmobiles access so much different terrain that it really requires a different guidebook. So what you are looking at in this guide is stuff you can walk to. The sled-access guide will have to be written by someone else. (Or me, if someone decides to give me that free snow machine.)
Finally, the author would like to acknowledge that some parts of this guide may not fully make sense. That is, some tiny areas like Crystal Theater get a lot of detail, and some massive areas like Chaffin Creek are just referred to in general terms. Part of that is a reflection of how skiers move across Western Montana – hordes more visit Crystal Theater in a single weekend than venture into Chaffin in a full winter – and part is a reflection of how well the author knows the area.
Aaron Teasdale on Bonner Mountain.
Chapter 3: Essentials
Get an early start, pack a lunch (and maybe a dinner, too), and get the avalanche forecast (http://missoulaavalanche.org/; http://www.flatheadavalanche.org/). Note that said forecasts cover only a fraction of the ski terrain also covered in this book and even when they do the forecasts themselves cover a huge swath of terrain with myriad variations. Though the reports are immensely helpful, avalanche assessment in western Montana really comes down to on-the-spot user assessments. In general, the snowpack on the western edge of the state is thicker and wetter, and gradually transitions to a drier,
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