A Season of Spring Skiing in the San Juan Mountains

Or, my test-drive blog post.

I started skiing when I was 2. My approach to skiing has gone through a lot of different phases over all that time - from not really enjoying it at all, to being a wannabe racer, to just wanting to ski the backcountry, to being a park rat, a wannabe freerider, a Baker bro, a turns-all-year acolyte, to someone whose ski season doesn’t really start till April.

I’m still adjusting to the continental snowpack after moving to Colorado from the PNW four years ago. Ice climbing tends to fill my winters, though I did ski more powder in 2024 than other recent years, but those six weeks from the middle of April to the end of May are still my favorite six of the year.

After a month on a work assignment in Baja, my ski season began with a series of epic powder days on the Trout-to-Ophir tour, a popular shuttle mission in the NW San Juans.

ALT

Yours truly in Gemini (top). The Himalayan Face, always calling (lower).

After one T-to-O day, Dani made me take a picture with my photo of her in Backcountry Mag, and I’m quite glad she did.

One day skiing Gemini with Dani, I brought the drone along. Check out the video here.

Shortly thereafter, stuck again yearning for someone else to get into the mountains with, I did a solo mission, Trout-to-Ophir-and-back-to-Trout (nixing the shuttle option in favor of my own legs: the hermit’s choice, not the smart one). I skied the Big O, one of the more prominent couloirs in Waterfall Canyon, made some GS turns through hero hippy pow into the bottom of the canyon, and upon realizing it was too warm to stick with my original plan of climbing back up an adjacent couloir to regain the ridge and descend back to my car, I took the long way out, tracing Waterfall Creek through low angle but consistent terrain, safe from the warming slabs and cornices that would haunt me otherwise. Not safe from dehydration and sleep deprivation, which always hit me like a train those first couple warm spring days.

Hero turns upon exiting the Big O.

I regained the ridge at a new-to-me location on the west shoulder of Pilot Knob, with a steep, exposed, unknown face between me and my car. My “safer exit” suddenly was feeling much less safe. I had a lot of words that day to describe the position I found myself in, dropping in blind on a face that I knew deadends in cliffs for 95% of it’s width. Today, 3 months later in the middle of a record setting July heatwave, I don’t seem to have as many. I trusted my intuition, ski cut a windslab, and followed my gut down towards what I hoped would be a sneak line through the cliff band. It went, but barely - just a couple centimeters wider than my 184cm skis through it’s gut, I made almost 1000 feet of hop turns before exiting onto familiar below-treeline terrain and lovely cruise back to the car.

Is it gonna go?

It goes! We got lucky. The ‘Pilot Pinner’ is a couloir I would actually welcome skiing again.

Next stop, The Coors Face, on Shandoka (Wilson Peak). This line needs no introduction. For me, it had been the only line in the San Juans to ever turn me back, having attempted it 3 times in the previous year (wind slab, a late start, and a rocky, not-filled-in crux being the 3 reasons I bailed).

Three previous bails left me feeling stubborn, I guess, and Nick and I skied it in mediocre conditions that I would not repeat again. Of all the '50 Classics’ I’ve skied, this was by far the worst in the given conditions. An inch of sugar snow often covered large, lurking sharks. I blew out an edge on one of them. It was kinda scary, and not really in the calculated, controlled sort of way, more of the 'this is stupid’ kind of way. The crux was largely rock, and I booted a small section. I’m glad I did it, but it truly felt like checking a box, which is not the way I want any of my mountain experiences to feel. I would need a record setting snowpack to come back.

Nick on the thin face. Shark attack!

Once through the choke, the lower couloir and apron was phenomenal. I would ski that section any day.

Photo by Gus Bosch, who skied the line a couple days later. You can see my and Nick’s tracks in the central couloir, lower on the face.

After that, I racked up 30000 feet of vert in a week of skiing in the Elk Mountains. I skied a couple more San Juan classics too, such as the Naked Lady.

The last Colorado ski mission of the season was in the La Plata Mountains, whose western facade presides over Montezuma County and is a never ending source of beautiful sunset landscapes from the mesa above my house in Dolores. The small sub range of the San Juans offers incredible powder skiing in the winter (often receiving greater and wetter snow than other parts of the range, comparable in some ways to Wolf Creek Pass or Marble) and plethora of fantastic couloir descents, complicated only by long and difficult access. A sled helps. On this day we chose mountain bikes to cover 5 or 6 miles of singletrack before reaching snowline.

We skied a perfect north-facing couloir off of Spiller Peak, which I have heard referred to as Ray’s Couloir, though I’m also partial to 'The Spillway’. Owen Basin, the headwaters of the not-so-mighty yet vital Mancos River, was criss-crossed with bear tracks and packed with fun-looking ice climbs, and one incredibly good looking quartzite boulder. An inspiring amphitheater indeed.

Bear report, above treeline, all aspects: active.

Nick climbing the couloir. Dibe Ntsaa (Hesperus) and Lavendar Peaks behind. An inspiring mountain venue indeed, if only it were easier to get to.

3, 2, 1….