Gnomedays
Satuday may have been the best day of snowboarding I’ve ever experienced & I only did one run. tRoy, a returned Seiberto, Ron the Marine, The Joe and self summited the Peaks about 300 feet shy of Humphrey’s summit after about three hours of hiking. We past the old B-29 bomber carcass up there, chilled for a moment and continued on through mostly rock & ice. Two feet the other side of where we topped out at, We dug a pit in windblown snizzle. I learned a bit more about avalanche dynamics from Ron (facets & rounds) and when we couldn’t push any snow down on The Joe, we each dropped in on a better than 45Ëš pitch and surfed the biggest coloir I’ve known yet. Originally, I was planning on dropping about 3o feet dowhill until I hiked up to tRoy & Rons better idea and thought… yea, this is good.
And I had the best turns of my life. It was about a 1000 foot drop to the warm-bottomed cirque. It was Kilo’s first descent into the basin and she had a good leader in Sazi. After Seiberto took the drop-in, cutting clean turns through the center of the channel, the dogs got to jonsing & bolted in after him on a direct line. They caught up with Seiberto in seconds. My turn came after tRoy rolled some nice curves. I peared over the edge, leaned forward to an uncomfortable degree and started my own line. Like diving off the high dive or dropping into a half-pipe, it was super freak. How it should be. It was a bit tight through the narrowest section with only 20 feet between rock jetties to both sides. Indeed I stumbled there but then found more confidence as it opened up and I could let my errors in balance & fall lines redirect me without consequence.
We sat at that bottom as is ritual, and stared back at our artwork for a bit. Enjoy the high… At the top, the quote of the day was “this is like sticking your dick in gods vagina.” at the bottom, that was pretty much what it was like…as far as what I can assume anyway. We look around the cirque there from the bottom and ponder the other options with the hope that better snow will come and let us ride the lines that are just too thin for now. Two wide channels closer to the summit of humphrey’s, there is a cliff drop of a tenish feet about 100 or 150 feet down. The only way there is to come off that cliff and fly about 40 feet before landng on the next section. I think that’s the line I would like to hit this winter if it snows just a bit more.
What an awesome day.