It had been snowing all week and I had the call to help tour around a couple of folks who wanted to scout the mountain for a special event. They were calling for steeps and this place has them, so what could I do but oblige.
The lucky thing for this team was that these were Crystal Mountain locals, Craig and John and with their season passes they had been using up several of their 10 free days of skiing at Big Sky. Being part of the same family definitely has its privileges.
We started with a solid lunch at Whiskey Jack’s, fajita special hit the spot and gave me the energy to work up toward Swift Current, I was joined by Chad from our events team and we loaded up four-wide met with amazing snow art work by the Swifty lift op.
The triple chair ride alone is worth the visit while surrounded by giant, jutting, amazing ridges that forms the cirque of Lone Mountain. After pointing out all the lines I have and haven’t skied we got to the Tram. At the top we made the call to find the soft snow in the Gullies. Once in position, we had the run to ourselves and skied boot top pow through first gully. There’s a spot, about 15 yards lower than the Crons traverse that you can sneak into the bottom half of 2nd Gully to the right. Once there we all found nice powder turns in the apron, I even snaked a couple of wispy face shots right before getting to the Turkey Traverse.
I turned around and the entire entourage was smiling so figuring I was doing something right, we headed toward another section of mountain from the Challenger lift. I’ve been hitting Highway a lot this year with amazing results and it was skiing particularly good today. I can’t explain why it happens, but there’s a section on the steep rollover that never gets a mogul, must be the wind groomer that buffs it nightly.
We go to BRT South and this is where the fun begins, I’m with expert skiers (and Chad) and I take off toward the face and when I have a good head of steam I decide to get light over a clump of trees. I don’t know what happened but when the skis landed back on snow, one of them decided not to stay with the rest of me and I skidded to a pillowy spot 20 yards down the hill. My team was nice enough to pick up my ski and I worked on getting back together for the rest of the run. You’d think my crashing adventures would be over, but just to really embarrass myself, right below the Explorer park in the flats I catch an edge maneuvering from switch to straight.
It’s official, this powder day would come to an end while sufficiently humbled but satisfied.The good news is that the mountain will be out there for another day to excite me, more snow if falling, only keeps getting better.
We’ll see you out there,
Dax
