Crested Butte, 4/3-4/5, 2001

Tony Crocker

Administrator
Staff member
These were the 3 days of the 10th annual U.S. Extreme Freeskiing Championships. On 4/3 the Comp was on Headwall, which retained a windpacked winter surface due to high altitude and north exposure. There were still many rocks due to below average March snow. Upper Paradise Bowl and most of the North Face also had dry snow, but much of it softened during this warm day. West-facing runs to the base had already been through a few melt/freezes and were in the best shape midday. Banana/Funnel was closed, but we did ski Peel in late afternoon. Adam found this kicker near the base.
CB01adam.jpg


4/4 had similar weather, and an early run on Spellbound/Phoenix had more variable snow than on 4/3. We skied 5 runs on the North Face, stopping a few times to check out the Competition. The Comp was on Staircase, where variable snow added to the challenge of steeps, rocks and trees.
CB02staircase.jpg


Some competitors skied Slot Rocks.
CB03slotrocks.jpg


4/5 had heavy overcast, with the base area and East River being the only areas with soft snow early on. We watched the entire Freeskiing finals on Spellbound/Phoenix.
CB05phoenix1.jpg


Women's winner Jennifer Ashton in Dead End Chutes:
CB04jendeadend.jpg


Overview of Dead End Chutes:
CB07deadend.jpg

Aaron Estrada won the comp by straight-lining the lower 2/3 of the picture above.

More of a billy goat line with small air at the end:
CB08lowdeadend.jpg


As the snow softened in bony terrain, some of it began to slide.
CB12slide.jpg


This skier is on his way to Rabbit Ears.
CB09enroute.jpg


Air from the notch between the Rabbit Ears:
CB10rabbitears1.jpg


The biggest crowd pleaser was "sickbird award" Brett Deuter, who hucked 40+ feet off the top of the right Rabbit Ear and skied away from the landing with only a broken ski pole for damages.
CB11rabbitears2.jpg

Enlarge the picture to see Deuter clearly with that dark rock background.

After the comp was over, we went back up the North Face and skied the Staircase area which had been the site of the previous day's competition.
 
During "slow season" each year I try to move my archive project along.

First step is to download the past seasons reports via HTTrack. We've seen ample evidence from the EpicSki debacle that if you want to save your content, it needs to be on your own computer.

Cleaning up and reuploading to one's own website takes more time. Therefore I prioritized the highlight trips on this page starting two years ago with extensive additions last year and 10-15 more this year.

What I'm working on now is linking selected TR's by region on my regional summary pages. That way, a reader can see below the stats of days and vertical skied per area, links to TR's from areas within that region. Most readers will be more interested in the TR's than the stats.

Two regions are done so far, Southern California and Other US Rockies. I'm next working on Colorado.

Southern California was fairly easy as I already had a page with the old Southland Ski Server Reports. The proportion of my skiing in SoCal has declined from about 15% in the Southland Ski Server era to about 5% since then, so not that many new reports needed to be added.

For destination regions my objective is to represent as many areas as possible while still preferring the better days with more pictures. In a few cases this may lead to days predating my first digital camera in March 2003. The Yellowstone Club was an obvious example and I note it attracted some interest here. I thought the Crested Butte Extreme Competition was another such case.

In general, retrieving film pictures to scan takes some time. Last year I did this for my Tuckerman Ravine trip in 1990, but overall I've skied so many different places since 2004 where the reports and pics are on FTO that I don't think I will spend that much time chasing down film pictures.

For now the links going on the regional pages will be to the FTO reports. I hope to select the TR's I want and get the rest of those pages done this month. Replacing the FTO links with my saved archive pages will be a more drawn out process. But the utility to readers of having the TR's grouped by region seems a worthy short term objective.

Patrick started a similar process about a decade before I did.
 
Tony Crocker":3k5b30jc said:
During "slow season" each year I try to move my archive project along.

First step is to download the past seasons reports via HTTrack. We've seen ample evidence from the EpicSki debacle that if you want to save your content, it needs to be on your own computer.
I get it now. Without a doubt about stuff being on your own computer or website as the longevity of the web discussion forums is becoming seriously in doubt, rapidly being replaced by social media or reddit or quora - all of which are sub-optimal IMO.

Witness the demise of
gunks.com - webmaster/site owner neglect
rockclimbing.com - overtaken by n00bs and trolls and lack of interest or time by the new/last owners
supertopo.com - copyright concerns and take-down notices prompted Chris MacNamara to suspend the forum and delete all the photos from their server - truly a shame as many were historic and posted by the people who did the first ascents of the routes on El Cap et al.

In the skiing world, TGR is basically a dick swinging contest these days.
I don't spend any time on Epicski so can't comment.

Tony Crocker":3k5b30jc said:
In general, retrieving film pictures to scan takes some time. Last year I did this for my Tuckerman Ravine trip in 1990, but overall I've skied so many different places since 2004 where the reports and pics are on FTO that I don't think I will spend that much time chasing down film pictures.
I shudder at the thought of digitizing the 4 or 5 thousand slides stored in my basement. Maybe when I retire....
 
MarcC":3bkding8 said:
I shudder at the thought of digitizing the 4 or 5 thousand slides stored in my basement. Maybe when I retire....
Thankfully my slide collection is modest, only two boxes. But I do want them digitized as they contain my 1982 New Zealand trip and a 1983 backcountry ski day on San Gorgonio. Any suggestions easiest way to do that?
 
Tony Crocker":3kq74upt said:
During "slow season" each year I try to move my archive project along.

First step is to download the past seasons reports via HTTrack. We've seen ample evidence from the EpicSki debacle that if you want to save your content, it needs to be on your own computer.

Cleaning up and reuploading to one's own website takes more time. Therefore I prioritized the highlight trips on this page starting two years ago with extensive additions last year and 10-15 more this year.

What I'm working on now is linking selected TR's by region on my regional summary pages. That way, a reader can see below the stats of days and vertical skied per area, links to TR's from areas within that region. Most readers will be more interested in the TR's than the stats.

Two regions are done so far, Southern California and Other US Rockies. I'm next working on Colorado.

Southern California was fairly easy as I already had a page with the old Southland Ski Server Reports. The proportion of my skiing in SoCal has declined from about 15% in the Southland Ski Server era to about 5% since then, so not that many new reports needed to be added.
I read a few of these reports listed on bestsnow. Esp. for areas that don't have a detailed analysis in your list of ski areas analyzed: http://bestsnow.net/main.htm#list

I love reading the detailed guides for future season planning. I wish I had read your heavenly guide before going there for my first ever ski day in Jan 2018. I would love to read more detailed area guides.

Novices: In my opinion, Heavenly remains a problematic mountain for beginners. One green section in California is the middle of the three layers, consisting of two trails with heavy traffic from more advanced skiers, and the other is at the low and sun-exposed base. The Boulder base area in Nevada and Big Easy at the top of the gondola are better, but only Boulder of these 4 distinct areas has as much as 400 vertical. The Galaxy chair of 1,100 vertical is actually the best novice area, but you have to ski at least 1,000 vertical of blue runs to get to it, and over 2,000 vertical of blue runs to get back to either base area. The other South Tahoe areas, Sierra at Tahoe (20 minute drive) and Kirkwood (40 minutes) are much better for beginners.
 
Back
Top