Crested Butte 3-18-06

Killclimbz

New member
Last weekend I made it up to Crested Butte. What a freaking great day! We climbed up Skookle. I believe our total uphill vert was 4800ft. 3500 the first climb and 1300 the second.
We started out around 9:30-ish I believe. Gotta love the BC warning signs.
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and my favorite part of the warning.
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Evan and Will getting ready to kick my ass all over the hill.
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Skinning up. We weren't even halfway at this point. The first climb came out to 3500 vertical feet.
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Evan and Will on top of a mushroom.
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A look out at the surrounding terrain from that point.
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Cody playing in the snow.
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After climbing 3500 vertical and me having a global thermal nuclear meltdown after falling out of the skin track on suncrust, we did our first drop. Steep 40-45 degree trees on top, mellowing out to a nice 35-38 degree pitch. Excellent turns, and with over 20" of snow for the week, great untracked pow. Around a 1500 vertical drop to a bench. No pics sorry. :oops: After that we decided to take the ridge again. About halfway up it stopped snowing and the sun broke for a bit, giving this great view of Mt Crested Butte and the valley floor that we had climbed up from.
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Then Cody started barking like crazy. When I caught up to him, he was bothering this fellar.
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I quickly got Cody to leave the porcupine alone. The 'pine' was only 4 or 5 feet away from the skin track almost level with me, even though he was 10 or 15 feet up in the tree.
So after getting back to the ridge top, totally exhausted we got to drop again. This time for double the vert we did before. Best snow of the day, bottomless pow.
Evan getting after it.
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Will and Cody, a little blurry.
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Then after dropping 2500 vert or so we got to a spot where Will had run out of steam on the flat. I told him to go ahead and change over to split mode as I glided past. Turned out there was one last steep section to go down and cross a snowbridge over the creek. Will did some "extreme" skiing. Check out the sick form yo.
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He managed to stick it.
A look back at Skookle.
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There is about another 500-700 vert you can't see in the pic. The stuff that looks like dirt is actually scrub brush. I am probably around a quarter mile away from the base of this ridge. It's huge. It took us an hour to skin out in the dark and heavy snow. Fortunately it was a flat skin.
Our routes up are in the yellow, and the red lines are our descents.
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Amazing stuff.
 
Nice tele turns :D

Great to see your dog hanging. I used to take my pup with me alot too, but he's 12 now. Last time I took him out he was in bad shape for a few days, way too hard on his joints, but the poor fella never gave me a hint he was suffering. I think his bc days are numbered now.

How old is cody? What breed?

p.s. great TR. :D
 
Cody is two years old now and crazy for the snow. I think he has more runs in than I do! The breed is a good question. He's probably part chow and got some sort of shepard in him. Definitely all American mutt.
So if I am lucky he's got another 7-8 years. You have to watch them, cause even if their guts are hanging out and legs are broken. They still want to go.
This guy was my first bc dog. Sam. A Samoyed border collie mix. Probably the bravest and best snow dog I ever saw. In the summer he could climb 5.4 slab. Unfortunately the last two years he just got to old and sore to go out in the bc with me and had to be put down last Christmas eve. RIP bud.
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