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Gear Debacle With a Silver Lining

In preparation for my first tour of the year, I lugged my new skis and boots out into the backyard and practiced getting in an out of my new Dynafit Beast 16 Bindings in the patchy snow. The 16 is essentially a rare beast, given its niche market, and two years in production followed by discontinuation. Why I’ve elected to use such an unusual apparatus is a story for another post – my intent here is to establish their rarity and my lack of familiarity with them. Indeed, upon picking them up mounted to my new skis from the shop, I had to be shown how to use them.

After cycling through the walk and touring modes a few times and shuffling around the backyard I was pretty certain that I had it down. With plans of dawn patrolling in the AM, the last thing I wanted to was to be fumbling with new gear in the dark, windy, early morning cold. Having proved reasonable competence to myself, I stowed the skis in the car and headed inside to install Hottronics into my new boots.

Fast forward to 5:30 AM and we find ourselves uttering curses into the wind as I step out of my fancy new bindings with every couple of strides on the skin track. By the light of our headlamps, we stare in bewilderment at these newfangled contraptions musing about what toggles, levers or processes we could possibly have misunderstood. Inexplicably they begin touring without prerelease and we sally forth into the pre-dawn haze.

We’re off to a much a slower start than we anticipated, but as luck would have it our timing perfectly coincides with some exceptional sunrise vistas.

Turns out, the skiing wasn’t too bad either. The drive up to the trailhead was worrisome, to say the least. Even the approach on the skin track had us wondering if this was going to be more of a winter hike than the powder chasing extravaganza we’d pined over during this bleak early season. But, after some poking around we identified the most leeward aspects and found them to be devoid of serious slabs below a certain elevation and a good deal deeper than expected. By the way, it turns out Dynafit Beast 16s slay deep powder just fine!

So anyway, we figured we’d lap this fluffy zone a few more times before the crowds showed up. We transitioned and were on the skin track back to Heaven when I was beset by a trifecta of critical gear breakdowns.

First, my (brand new) left boot heater crapped out. I noticed that the cable was only partially inserted into the battery. Upon further inspection, I saw that it was nearly severed! I pulled it out, looked at it, and put it back in when it totally disintegrated. I guess I owe REI a call… Ordinarily, the loss of such a luxury item garners little sympathy, but when your a fool like me and go skiing at -40 degrees Fahrenheit in plug race boots and permanently damage your feet, these things can become an issue. I figured as long as we kept up a decent hustle on the skin track, I’d generate enough heat to stave off any real issues…

Second, the Dynafit Beast 16 touring-mode auto release strikes back! But unlike the first bout of auto-release where I was standing on flat firm snow next to the car, this time around I was standing on a steep pitch in waist deep snow. One stride: good. Two strides: great. Three strides: whoa I’m wallowing like a pig in his trough up to my belly in snow. This happened a handful of times during which my one unheated foot became progressively colder…

And finally, for debacle numero tres, a piece of plastic broke off of my brand spanking new Dynafit Beast 16s while I was resetting the bindings to get back into touring mode. At this stage of the game, I pretty much decided that the number of things gone wrong in rapid succession was tipping the scales too far out of my comfort zone to consider skiing further and we agreed to retreat. As a public service announcement, I implore anyone who fails to follow my reasoning on this matter to quickly locate a copy of “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, grab a beverage, put your feet up and enjoy a contemplative afternoon on the couch.

We skulked out of the woods and drove down from the mountains, whereupon I proceeded straight to the mountain shop. The gentlemen at Neptune showed me how to properly use my Beast Bindings – turns out it was mostly operator error. There’s a small metal tab which is supposed to lock down when you step into the bindings; if it doesn’t you can do it with a ski pole. For some reason, it was never locking down in walking mode, but the problem has an easy fix.

When the toe wings are opened and prepared to receive the boot, the small metal tab will flip up.

Once you’ve stepped in, the tab should flip down. If not insert a ski pole tip and lever it closed.

And finally, here is the failed piece which I’ll need to call Dynafit about. Hopefully, they can just send me a replacement part. This piece is totally independent of the downhill skiing mode, so it won’t be a safety issue. When the binding is in walk mode, it acts as a guide which prevents the toe piece from pivoting. Pretty important, but not totally broken, so hopefully I can limp along while I’m waiting for a replacement part.

Not broken.

Broken.

But even amid all of these varied gear debacles, there was no shortage of smiles to be had!

Long Cut on Long’s Peak

As a long overdue follow-on to last year’s post Long Day on Long’s Peak (anyone else enjoy that play on words?), I present Long’s Peak: Keyhole Route. I’m continuing with a couple themes that I’ve latched onto recently.

Google Earth flyovers – I don’t have a helicopter or a RED Digital Cinema camera so you get this instead. I think it’s cool looking and it adds some context…
Some semblance or story arc. Alright maybe that’s a stretch, but the idea here (seen also in Castle Peak and mostly not seen in any of my skiing stuff) is that a solidly good, 1water1coffee1beer sort of day has a beginning, middle and end during which we travel through a variety of moods, conditions, and settings; almost like a miniature epic…
Playlist format – saves me from feeling quite as bad when I have to cut 98% of the footage but allows for at least some of it to be narrowly focused and less indulgent than I often tend to be because I can include a few extras that would otherwise be gratuitous in an amateur short video.

Alright enough blabbing! Full-screen, volume up, and draw the blinds a bit – best viewed with no glare!

Ouzel Backpacking

It occurred to us the other day, that for some reason we haven’t been backpacking once yet in Colorado! Clearly this was unacceptable, so Kelly picked out a nice warm-up outing so we could get our backpacking legs under us for the season. We booked a spot at Ouzel Lake, which has an upper and lower site. The lower spots were filled so we settled for the upper sites. The upper site is a tad farther from the trail-head, though in either case the whole walk would have been roughly 10 miles round trip. Would have been…

We’ll return to that thought in a bit. Before all of that, we travelled over a gently climbing and well maintained trail that hugs the St. Vrain and then the Ouzel Creek, through sparse pine forests, over several aesthetically appealing timber bridges, past raging cascades and eventually onto a thinly treed ridge offering 360 degrees of views, at least 270 degrees of which are spectacular.

…And as you can see above, the trail was ultimately smothered by an expansive blanket of snow. The well traveled bits and the sun baked parts were plenty supportable and we hardly needed our spikes. In fact, all was well until we lost the trail somewhere after the lower camp area. No worry; we’d just use Backcountry Navigator and the USGS tiles I just downloaded for the region that morning. We navigated back toward the trail and followed it up hill and into the woods through increasingly deep snow and steep terrain until we found ourselves standing atop a snow-bridge under which the Ouzel Creek roared savagely in the spring melt.

After Kelly briefly dipped a foot in the water we agreed to follow the trail as closely as we could without crossing any buried water. We bushwhacked further up a convoluted pine forest that would have made for an absolute playground of midwinter tree-skiing: constant pillowy undulations, and perfectly spaced trees. We navigated off trail through cliffbands and around snowy canyons until we were approximately to the location marked on the map as the upper campsite. After a solid hour of travel, we had covered only one mile. Bushwhacking in shin deep snow is no joke!

A second, third and maybe fourth look at the map revealed that we should have been standing in the creek. Indeed, we were standing on a small ridge running east-west. The creek emerged from a cliffside roughly to our north, and traversed under us to the south. We pondered this paradox briefly before concluding that we were standing on a massive snow drift (25 feet deep at least!?!?!) with running water below.

We realized that the campsites were essentially no more find-able than the trail, so we backtracked down toward the lower site. The lower site was in a similar state of affairs. No gargantuan snow drifts, but all low lying, flat terrain was buried in who knows how much snow. At least it was flat. Somewhat indifferent with defeat, we settled on the first level spot, threw down our packs and made camp.

#ouzel lake #backpacking with @kellyahowie stay tuned – there’s a lot more where this came from! #nofilter #gopro #hero5black #rmnp

A post shared by Brian Sweeney (@briangsweeney) on Jun 4, 2017 at 6:01pm PDT

Backpacking in our backyard at Ouzel Lake #lovewhereyoulive #rmnp #backpacking

A post shared by Kelly Howie (@kellyahowie) on Jun 4, 2017 at 6:50pm PDT

Turns out, the spot we arbitrarily settled on could hardly have been better. Water was close at hand, and the views in either direction were great. We feasted, set up some time lapses, shot photos, strolled about and crawled into bed as soon as it was acceptably late. A nocturnal bathroom break yielded absolutely still air, a brilliant half moon, and surprisingly good visibility – no headlamps needed really, even though it was the middle of the night.

It must have been below freezing for most of the night, because the snow firmed up as soon as the sun set. Around 3 or 4 in the morning my 45 degree back became a little bit inadequate so I pulled on a down jacket snoozed happily until the sun woke us both in the morning.

When we crawled out of bed, our boots, socks and packs were covered in a light frost, which evaporated almost as soon as the sun hit them. The hike out was fast and cool in the morning air. In a couple of hours, backpacking number one was in the books and we were on our way to après-hike Mexican food.

Flash! Thunder!

Similarly spectacular, but an order of magnitude more perilous, hike number two is in the books for Brian and Kelly in Colorado: Season 2. Objective hazards don’t really eat at me all that much. A long climb in no-fall terrain, for example is cut and dry: be careful and don’t fall. Or storm skiing in the backcountry: stay off the steep slopes or anything attached to a steep slope. Risk mitigated. It’s the stuff that you really have no control over – no effective means of mitigation – that freaks me out.

Like lightning.

What to do about lightning… Run for cover I guess? A dubious proposition at best, if above treeline. Or in an an expansive pasture which extends for miles in all directions. I suppose the best you can do is make haste downhill until you find yourself surrounded by old growth where the chance of being directly struck or of being fragged by a Lodgepole Pine whose impedance was a bit too high to transmit 100 million Volts is reasonably remote is really your only recourse.

Yikes!

We checked the living daylights out of the forecast, saw that there was a chance of showers and thunder around 2PM and settled on a turnaround time of noon. We hit the trail at quarter to 9AM, summitted at or before 11AM, took stock of the brooding, dark clouds, and hightailed it out of the alpine. As soon as we hit treeline we were greeted by an unmistakable blue-ish flash and a near-contemporaneous crack. We hit the deck, no doubt far too late to make any difference to mother nature, cinched up our pack suspensions and hauled ass downhill as fast as wet snow and micro-spikes will allow. Our new friend Rolling Thunder followed us downhill for a good mile or so before we began to feel comfortable with the level of risk.

To make a long story short, we were not struck. We did, however, capture some cool pictures of the ominous skies and swirling clouds between running for our lives and wondering whether or not NOAA is to be trusted in the future…