Catskiing

It's the end of February and I'm sitting in the south of Germany. When I look out of the window, all I see is green. At least the sun is shining. Unfortunately, when I look at the World Wide Web, I don't see any forecasts that could stir my emotions. In my home mountains, the High Tatras (Poland), the pictures on social media only show beautiful slopes reflecting in the sun, but hardly any snow, which is also frozen hard.

Everything is political, including the VdW. We are hereby making our peace-building contribution through the power of moving images and freeriding. I, for one, wish to ski in Ukraine one day and visit the cool couchsurfers from 2 years ago! Peace.

The next morning it was the same picture. Again it had snowed 30 cm of the finest Champaign powder overnight and we didn't know whether we were in a freerider's dream world. For us, this meant pure anticipation of another 12 to 14 runs through untracked terrain. For Karl and his guides, however, this meant getting up two hours earlier, digging snow profiles, checking weather data, assessing the avalanche situation and deciding which runs were justifiable for the least risky freeriding possible. A responsible and tough job, but one that is rewarded on the first descent when the lead guide MUST be the first to ski down an untracked slope.

The last part of Patrick Fux's 12-week powder trip begins in Red Mountain in Canada and leads via a cat-skiing detour in deep powder to Beijing and from there back to the Swiss Alps, where there is very little snow.

We spent the Monday of my penultimate week of skiing in Mount Washington, where we had driven into the area the evening before and once again treated ourselves to the luxury of ski-in/ski-out accommodation so that we could safely catch the first lift. We were worried that the predicted large amounts of snow could block the access road and we didn't want to risk that.

Telluride and Silverton are just ten miles apart as the crow flies. By car, however, you have to drive around the entire mountain range on the San Juan Skyway.
Blue lights flashed behind us as we drove down the pass road towards the Ridgeway.

In artificially bad English, we explained to the sheriff that we were just following the other cars. But even that didn't help. He kindly insisted that we had been traveling around 5 miles per hour too fast. However, as a first-time offender in the state of Colorado, you are only due a warning, not a fine.

After everything that could go wrong went wrong, the gods finally smiled on us and dumped 30cms of fresh, breathless powder on Termas de Chillan on Tuesday night. We woke up to a foot of dry snow piled on the bannister on the deck, and immediately the trials and tribulations of the past week were out and the electric energy of a pow day was in. Yeah!!!

To recount the joys of traveling, I got stuck in the Lima airport for 2 days after I thought my flight was at 1.40pm rather than am. You would think I would know to check that by now, but I didn`t. Some things never sink in.

Catskiing at Island Lake Lodge was on the agenda for the last day of our BC road trip. Also known as a cheap version of heli-skiing, cat skiing involves being transported to the most beautiful peaks in the remote backcountry by a snowcat with a passenger cabin.