Skiing in April

I'm a little behind in blogging...there's a lot to reflect on and share. I'll do my best to make the most of my free time and catch up. It's a funny, fine balance that you have to find between actually getting out and doing things or writing about them. But I've come to love both and realize that balance is important in everything I do.

April has been very good to us skier types, with more and more snow continuing to pile up in one of the biggest snowpacks Montana has had in years. Flooding is being predicted, especially if it decides to suddenly be summer in the next week or so. As it is, we're still skiing powder! In preparation for our upcoming trip to Alaska in June, Dad and I are trying to put in big vertical days. It hasn't been hard to do that "extra" lap when you're skiing knee-deep dry powder on April 23rd.

Mom putting on her skins after a fun out-of-bounds lap in the Canyon. She's a backcountry pro now after our trip to Fairy Meadows! We had just skied down the open meadow just above Mom's head. 

The resort closed in fine fashion. Saturday was a great day with sunshine and clear skies. Costumes abounded in the resort and skiing was fantastic on an out-of-bounds lap first thing in the morning. Then the sun-softened groomers were smokin' fast in the afternoon. Hero-slush! Sunday was a little crummy and icy, but it's the last day of lift-served skiing, so you have to go up and you can't complain about skiing with good friends.

Sunscreen application party!

Fun with a self-timer. We were trying to jump together: Larkin needs to work on her timing; I've just had a lot of practice with my camera. The snow-capped peaks of Glacier beckon in the background.

Larkin came up for her 21st birthday and we got to hang out all day that Tuesday. After good convo over breakfast we went and hiked the mountain for some good skiing. We were blessed with a great day: good snow and sunshine. Later that afternoon we climbed at the gym near our house and celebrated with the folks over an amazing dinner, complete with specialty beer tasting.

Padre shredding some April powder! That man can drop a knee, let me tell you.

Last Saturday (April 23rd mind you) Dad and I got after it in the backcountry of the Middle Fork. We had skinned up and skied at Big Mountain the day before racking up close to 6000 feet, which is the equivalent to our planned summit day on Denali. As I said above, the snow was amazing and we quickly lapped a 1700' run to compile 6300' by 3pm. If someone had told me that I would be getting faceshots the end of April earlier this year, I would have laughed at them. I would like to be up in the alpine shredding couloirs off some peaks in Glacier by now in the year, but the new snow is keeping the avy potential pretty high. Oh well, we'll just keep skiing the trees and shredding until everything stabilizes. Then we'll go "get some!"

The worst thing about this time of year is deciding what to do. Trails are drying up for biking, rock is warm from spring sun, rivers are starting to run fast begging to be paddled, and the snow is still good up high in the mountains. What's a guy to do? I'll have to start doing 2-a-days to pack in multiple sports...