Jay Beyer took this shot of me from inside the gut of the Montgomery Chute, which we skied with Andy Jacobsen last season. Black Diamond is currently running it as an ad for their skis. I was skiing on the Havoc’s, which are my steep chute ski of choice.
Rating S5+, 53 degrees, with a 75 foot rappel in the middle.
Montgomery is a really steep and beautiful line that would be a classic if it were longer. It’s a bit tricky to find, but you’ll know it once you are peering into it from the top of Thunder ridge. You could downclimb into it from above, but we chose to rap over some 40ft of mixed snow and rock to access the top. It was a stormy day and we couldn’t see very far as we stood at the ramp gaining the nerve to drop in. The snow was good and edgy, perfect steep skiing conditions. We hop and chopped our way to the edge of the 75ft cliff and then things got more interesting. The piton anchors that we finally found were loose, really loose, AJ pulled them out by hand with his first tug. We were unprepared for this and spent the next half hour getting creative. I dug a deadman anchor with my probe, AJ tried to bang in the pitons with a rock (we didn’t have a hammer) and Jay hung out on a platform and tried not to “freak out”. None of these options were acceptable. We finally found a good horn to loop and rappel off of after some digging around. The rap puts you onto a super steep and tight chute that empties out onto the apron. We were all pretty gripped from the adventure and learned to come prepared to place your own pro if the line has a rappel that you’re unfamiliar with. Short vid of the mini epic coming soon.
