SKI TRIBES OF THE SAN JUANS

Via Outdoor Research Verticulture 

By story by Mark Allen and video edited by Mike Bromberg

   

Mark with the RMU team at the OPUS hut in the San Juans CO. This is apparently called "claiming it." Photo Nate Disser

Ski cultures are territorial, especially the old ones. The local’s band up like gorillas claiming large swaths of alpine territory. The troops get protective when others invade. Guarding the stash can become a way of life. The local chiefs are elusive and operate in the shadows. These full-timers are the real silverbacks. The local tribe knows more than god about the terrain and roams in the less obvious. Their timing always seems perfect as you gaze upon their tracks from a distant ridge and wonder. They lurk in the areas that we all want. They arrive there while we are drinking coffee. They have spent a lifetime looking for these places and have discovered them. The lines are not documented but recorded in the minds and verbal histories of the privileged. This is their land, their terrain, and you are a visitor. You might see their tracks, but sightings are rare. Tracking them can be dangerous prospect. They might feel hunted and reactions are unpredictable. You should stick to what you can ski from the road.

This tribal phenomenon is rich in the Southwestern Colorado San Juan Mountains. This area is home to one of the oldest ski cultures in the country and is also one of the least developed. For example, there is no formal written documentation or publication of first descents and features are often unnamed; most significant information has transcended the generations through verbal history. At 13,000ft plus, alpine ridge crests develop distinctly segregated circles that separate the populations. This cultural division has always reminded me of the evolutionary history of minority groups in Southwestern China. Large groups of people separated by terrain that after thousands of years have distinctly diverged languages and traditions. Silverton, Ophir, Ouray, Ridway, Durango, Telluride all have separate castes of usual suspects operating in their respective terrain. They even have different names for the same futures seen from opposite sides. The explanation for this is simple. The terrain is constructed in such a way that discourages travel. One could ski tour from Silverton to Telluride faster than one can drive there. The biodiversity is limited. So is information sharing.

Mark in deep. Who said CO had a bad 2012 season?Must have been the FrontRangers 

               Photo: Nate Disser

The snow pack is technical. More, it is intriguing. To complicate matters there are six to seven micro climates in the San Juans that manipulate the weather. This is dependant on how the storm tracks into the range and how the mountains alter the air masses relative to the complex terrain. Telluride will get 15” and Silverton will accumulate 2” yet the towns are 12 miles apart as the crows fly. Truthfully, the opposite trend is typically the case, but Silverton wants Telluride to believe just what it needs to.  The local wind effect here makes it difficult to find the stashes at first. The wind here is the most powerful factor. Large wind events will strip windward faces to the ground. The snowpack will be transported in its entirety to the leeward aspect. This all making perfect avalanche country.

The usual suspect Eagle slide path crossing highway 550 in two places. This path is such a regular customer the DOT gave it its own weather station. Photo: Jerry Roberts 

Asking around the verbal history of the area is vague. I have picked up scraps of information in coffee shops, taverns, and road cuts. My casual research tells me the early ski explorers in this avalanche stricken terrain were some of the nations first avalanche forecasters hired by the state of Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) and National Forest Service. Their job was to keep Highway 550 open for commerce. This effort was not in vein since during the winter of 2006 – 2007, the CDOT triggered 464 avalanches with explosives for mitigation purposes. 159 of the controlled slides impacted Colorado highways. Veteran CDOT forecaster Jerry Roberts is a local living legend and was part of the first the group responsible for most of original exploration and naming of the back country zones in the Silverton area in the mid 60’s-mid 70’s. Compared to the big ski descents in the Elk Mountains by Colorado ski legend Chris Landry and company, the history in the San Juans would play out in the shadows and go unnoticed. Do to the correlation with avalanche mitigation several of the ski runs here were named after slide paths that hit the highway. The only ski beta sold for years was the Colorado Department of Transportation slide path map. This is the most intact record of the San Juan ski history. The passes are still today mitigated by CDOT with artillery from a vintage Korean War howitzer. One of the culprit paths is named “The Battleship” in its honor. Outside of these documented paths the consistency of names drift. Which name you use will indicate just how long you have been here. Roberts’s crew skied most of the main drainages for better understanding of the continental snow pack.  Roberts stated ”We were not special skiers in any way, we were just the only ones exploring.”

Kendal mountain North Face. One of the many tours that you start by walking across the street.

Contemporary bands of elusive locals from Silverton are the contributors to recent King Lines. Not naming names to protect the innocent, they can be found all living on one of the most unassuming back alleys on the other side of the tracks in the town of Silverton. They are a group of unsung heroes without team name or sponsor. They are tackling the never skied bold lines San Juans 13K peaks and taking the secret home with them. A few of them are responsible for a descent of Hunter in the Alaska Range. Mount Hunter is a entry test piece of American mountaineering to climb let alone ski. They sneak into the deep corners of the San Juans, redefine the standard, and slip back into town to saddle up to the Miners Tavern. That’s the way its been done here for decades and that’s the way the trend seems to remain.

Brian Rougeux getting his split-board on deep in Lakes Basin 

The most common trend in the terrain accessed from the Highway 550 these days is the presence of more people. The rapid pulses of public interest in back country skiing due to the advances in gear, media, and its availability are making places like the San Juans more accessible.  Silverton Mountain, Helitrax, San Juan Ski Co, San Juan Mountain Guides are all services bringing the public into the snow. Andrew Klotz is the author of new guidebook “Cold Smoke” writes about San Juan backcountry and showcases 25 classic tours of the area. This book has had little effect on the true secrets of the area covering only few of roadside classics. Recently the town of Silverton has transformed from a mining boom town and has seen a resurgence as a ski advocates epicenter. The Elementary School even has PE classes on skis for local kids. The town’s main ski hill, Silverton Mountain, is a brutally rugged, experts only, sidecountry ski area. More, the sleepy town hosts collections of boutique manufactures like Venture Snowboards and Skis, Scotty Bobs Skiworks, Mountainboy Sleds, Montanya rum distillery, and the Silverton Brewing Co. The town’s exports have become cold powder, skis, split boards, local brews, and kicksleds

All of these factors are encouraging new activity to what is easily seen from the road and the ski are, bringing a new resident culture to the range with it. Yet, the core tribes of the range are still skiing the lines that have never seen second descents by outsiders. The silverbacks’ wish to keep it that way.  Approach at your own risk.

Somewhere in the San Jauns

Written story by OR Brand Ambassador Mark Allen. An IFMGA guide, he spends winters in the San Juan Mountains of Silverton guiding ski, ice, and Level 1-2 AIARE hut based avalanche courses as a lead guide for San Juan Mountain Guides of Colorado. Check out his program list at www.mtnguide.net. The video was filmed and edited by OR athlete Mike Bromberg, also IFMGA certified as a guide. Mike splits his time between Crested Butte, Colorado,Chamonix, France and now is resident guide in Revelstoke BC with his company Mountain Pro.

Twin Sisters Haute Route: North Cascades

Twin Sister Haute Route, Grade V, 4th class, snow/ice 60 degree ascent, 45 degree ski descent. Possibly the first recorded ski traverse of the Twin Sister Range, North Cascade Mountains,
by Mark Allen, Greg Balco, Paul Kimbrough, and Chris Simmons. May 12, 13, and 14, 2006.

post by Chris Simmons


This trip was inspired by a previous climbing trip to the North Twin Sister Peak in February 2005. In the fall of 2005, I started to trace out a possible traverse route on topographical mapping software. During the 2006 winter, I found three other excellent skiers who were foolish enough to say yes; Paul, Greg, and Mark.



Mark and I met a month before the trip to look over the route and peer at a series of photos provided by John Scurlock. The route looked possible. The whole team met again in two weeks before the trip to look over the route, John’s photos, and discuss gear requirements.

We met Thursday night at my house to pack and make some final food purchases at the grocery store. Early Friday morning we cached Greg’s car at the end of the road for the North and South Twin Sister Peak climbs, and my girlfriend dropped us off at the other end near Hamilton. The access information is described below.



Friday, 12 May 2006, Day One:
We didn’t start where we originally intended and we needed to get a view of the range to get our bearings. Low clouds and snow showers kept us guessing until a lucky break in the weather while crossing an “artificial alpine zone” provided us with the view we needed. An hour and a half of skinning gained us the spine of the range immediately below the southernmost named summit, Step Sister Peak. We followed the ridge north, requiring a final boot pack to the summit, earning our first descent of the trip, the North Face of Last Sister Peak. We crossed the ridge to the east again and traversed the glacier on the east aspect of Nancy Peak, crossed a cleaver nick-named the Southern Divide and gained the glacier below the east aspect of Barbara Peak, which we provisionally named the Ripple Glacier. We climbed and skied in a zigzag pattern across the Ripple and Trisolace Glaciers until we reached the Saddle Slabs and Twin Crests where we made camp for the night.



Saturday, 13 May 2006, Day Two:
We got an early start and skied down the eastern slopes of Twin Crests and the Twin Crests Glacier before climbing back up to camp, shouldering our packs, and crossing the Saddle to the west side of the range. We dropped packs again in the bowl underneath the South Face of Little Sister Peak where Mark skied the proudest line of the trip, climbing and descending up the South Face Couloir. We hiked up to the summit ridge of Cinderella and skied the North Face, continuing down the Greater Green Creek Glacier before heading back up to the Little Sister-Cinderella Col and continuing north along the west side of the range linking together the little glaciers and cirques on the west slopes of Little Sister, Hayden, and Skookum Peaks, before finally hitting the ridge wall blocking our access to the Sisters Glacier at 4pm.



This proved to be the crux of the trip. Difficult 4th class and steep snow with heavy packs and skis required us to rope up. We also discovered our first mistake – Mark’s 9mm rope turned out to be 20 meters long, not matching up well with Greg’s 8mm 30-meter rando line. With only one thin rack for both teams, I lead the first short pitch without a pack, belayed everyone up, and then rapped down and re-climbed the pitch with my pack on a top rope while Mark lead a second shorter 20 meter pitch to the snowfield. Since Mark and Paul had the shorter rope, they lead the way as we simul-climbed the following 100+ meters of steep snow to the ridge top. We gained the ridge with perhaps a half-hour of light left.

John’s photos and the map show the Sisters Glacier clearly reaching the ridge top at the lowest notch immediately south of South Twin Sister. Instead we were looking down at 100 meters of rappelling. The ridge terrain was protected by numerous gendarmes, so we opted to rap off the ridge top where we were freezing in the wind, and finding our way down. We had to pull head-lamps out after the first 20 meter rappel to a horn. From there, we tied the two ropes together for a single strand, 40 meter rappel, which Mark down-climbed. Being his idea, and not realizing I was waiting for him to offer “Rock-Paper-Scissors”, he took my silence as refusal and offered to do it himself. Thank God. We were all pretty hammered at this point, and I was not happy.

Another single strand, 50 meter rappel over a blank, verglassed rock wall reached the glacier. We left the rope to collect the next day and stumbled down to the flats of the glacier finally setting up camp at 2:30am. When we finished dinner and hot drinks, we were all nodding off over our bowls and the sky was beginning to brighten.

Sunday, 14 May 2006, Day Three:
We were forced up at 9:30am by the bright light and heat of the day. A hard discussion over breakfast reached an agreement to forego an attempt to retrieve the ropes. As it turns out, the 8mm rappel line was rubbing over two rock edges, and neither Mark nor I were willing to risk jugging back up the line with a Tibloc and Reverso. We looked around to see if there was an easier way to climb up and traverse over using the hanging end of the 9mm strand to belay with, but saw nothing. The rope is still there and both of us expect to return later this year to retrieve it.



At 11pm we skinned and climbed up to the notch we had hoped to reach the day before and discovered why we had missed it. A full 40 meter pitch of 5th class chimney would have been required to reach the notch from the west side. This would not be possible for this team or with our packs. Our curiosity satisfied, we skied a couple of laps on the Sisters Glacier before descending below the North Ridge of South Twin Sister Peak and traversed across the Sisters Glacier to the North Ridge of North Twin. Once again, our intended notch looked good from our side on the east, but was cliffed out on the west. We continued lower down the ridge to the next notch which did prove passable. However, we ended up 1000’ below our intended route and a final skin gained us the bench below the North Face of North Twin Sister. A final descent through mashed-potato snow lead to a clear cut and road beneath the West Ridge where we were forced to take our skis off at 3800 feet. The final 5 miles of hiking in our boots finally ended when we crossed the welded steel of the Middle Fork Nooksack Bridge, and walked over to Greg’s car. It was over.

Conclusions and Lessons Learned:
There are two ways to access the Sisters Glacier which must be reached in order to finish the traverse. We don’t recommend following our route over Mirage Peak. The first possible route is to cross the Greater Green Creek Glacier to the east of Hayden and Skookum Peaks and climb a steep snow couloir that leads directly to the Sisters Glacier. Another possibility is to climb the South Face of South Twin Sister and descend the North Face.

A 60m rope would be ideal. Two 60 meter ropes are necessary if you choose to follow our line.
A speed traverse would probably work best from North to South, because one could descend the Sisters Glacier Couloir to the Green Creek Glacier instead.
We originally had hoped to climb and ski the North Face of South Twin and then ascend the South Gully of North Twin to ski the North Face. Saturday’s climbing over the ridge, our lack of sleep, and the incredible heat that hit us on Sunday put a stop to any of our ideas.

We gave a number of provisional names to a number of features to make conversations easier:
Nancy Glacier – located in the east bowl of Nancy Peak
Southern Divide – the cleaver that forms where the NE Ridge of Nancy and the SE Ridge of Barbara Peaks merge and separate the Nancy and Ripple Glaciers
Ripple Glacier – located in the east bowl of Barbara Peak
Trisolace Glacier – located in the three basins NE of Trisolace Peak
Twin Crests Basin – located NE of the Twin Crests and Saddle Slabs
Little Sister Cirque – located in the west bowl of Little Sister Peak
Hayden Cirque – located in the west bowl of Hayden Peak
Moraine Cirque – located in the north bowl of Skookum Peak
Northern Divide – the great headwall between Skookum and South Twin Sister that separate the Green Creek and Sister Glaciers
Mirage Peak – the 200-foot tall summit of the South Ridge of South Twin, which we climbed up and over at its highest point
Twin Glacier – located in the bowl on the west side of the ridge separating the North and South Twins
North Twin Glacier – located in the basin NE of North Twin

We traveled 30 hours in three days, covered 21 miles, gained 12,000 feet, descended 14,000 feet, skied every single permanent snowfield/ice field/glacier except for the Twin Glacier according to the USGS topo and made significant descents from the North Faces of Last Sister, South Twin Crest, and Cinderella; and the South Face of Little Sister.

Gear:
Typical backcountry ski and avalanche equipment. Each member carried a transceiver, shovel and probe. Greg was on tele-gear.
Ski crampons
1 Megamid tent
2 pocket rocket stoves with four canisters, two pots, and one tea pot
ice hammer
1 picket
rack: 6 knifeblades, stoppers #4-#10, #0.75-#1-#2 cams, #10 hex, 2 ice screws, 4 shoulder length slings with biners, two double length slings with biners
ropes: 9mm, 20 meters & 8mm, 30 meters
Each: helmet, harness, crampons, ice axe, belay device, three locking carabiners, one cordellete

Approach:
The Upper South Fork of the Nooksack River is closed by the Forest Service as Critical Elk Habitat from 1 November to 1 July. This effectively eliminates accessing the ridge from Baker Lake. The logging services follow suit on their private land upstream from Hadley Creek.
I convinced the Forester at Sierra Cascade Industries that this trip was part of my studies in Adventure Recreation, contributing directly to my degree and my professor vouched for my academics. We received permission to be dropped off via the roads up Hadley Creek, provided that we were careful around and didn’t interfere with logging operations that were in progress. Crown Pacific sold their land holdings to three different logging companies and they have an agreement to minimize non-business access as much as possible to minimize interference. I don’t expect to get this permission again.
Next time I plan to use our back-up plan, which is to drive as close as possible to the summit of Mount Josephine, hike up and over, drop down to the South Fork and climb back out to Bear Lake. This route is only 3.8 miles as the crow flies, but 9.5 miles of logging roads. The good news is that if you wait for the snow line to be at or below 2000 feet, this could be accomplished entirely on skis. Otherwise, bring a pair of shoes.

Special Thanks To:
Our friends and families who encouraged us, wished us luck, and thought about us while we were out there
John Scurlock for the aerial photography
Sierra Cascade Industries for access into the South Fork Nooksack valley.
Annie at WWU’s Huxley Map Library for the time and hard work making my taped together creation, digitizing it, and reprinting it into a great map.
Patsy for the driving and drop-off.

I’ve tried to keep this as factually as possible. The crazy and funny stories that come with this trip should be heard with a beer.

Chris Simmons