wildcat rally

There was the initial idea by Teague Holmes to go up Neffs Canyon, head into Porter Fork and keep skiing north facing shots off Raymond and Gobblers and finish with Wilson Headwall, or till our legs fell off. Tom Goth added the last minute variation of starting up Olympus and including a few north facing lines on the way, thus ensuring that our legs would definately fall off. I liked the idea for several reasons. I hadn’t explored some of the upper Neffs/Porter terrain, and it just had an elegance to the route by connecting long classic north facing pow lines off the same ridge. With good snow up high and motivation even higher Teague Holmes, Elliott Barcikowski, Tom Goth, Lars K and I set out to ski some powder last Saturday.

Behold the Wildcat Rally!

We were on the trail at a little after 6 am. I’ve never climbed the summer trail in the winter, but since this winter has felt more like summer we put on trail shoes and made our way. Sunrise from the saddle of Olympus.

Most the scrambling on Oly is easy until you add a little snow and ice, then it’s more engaging.

Topping out and looking west towards the namesake Wildcat Ridge.

To get to Memorial #1 requires a little down-climb, again not a big deal in the summer, but spicy and fun in the winter.

I guess it’s nice to be as fast as Tom Goth, cause he was always ready to drop before everybody else. And so, he dropped most lines before everybody else.

We liked what we saw and we liked what we skied! There was some concern this chute might not be “in”, but it was perfect pow from top to bottom.

Lars K halfway down.

Captain Teague always psyched and smiling!

Off to a good start we put the skins on and broke trail over to Hobbs Peak and worked our way up it’s main chute.

There was much discussion on the day about what the hell we were doing! Is it skimo, backcountry skiing, or ski mountaineering? Tom’s tights were casting strong votes for skimo. I like that the definitions of what is what are being blurred in the backcountry. Find the right tools to do whatever the hell you want to get done in the mountains. It’s skiing, add any other words on top of that and it’s just marketing. We topped out on Hobbs Peak just because.

Lars had to bail and get back for some quality family time, so we decided to give him our trail shoes so we didn’t have to haul them the rest of the day. He’s a beast and his trail-breaking was much appreciated. We were bummed to see him go.

Looking back at Mount Olympus on the right and Hobbs Peak Chute in the center of the pic.

As we hit the ridge again we could see far ahead to Mount Raymond on the right and Gobblers Knob on the left. Still a LONG ways off. This crew is fast, very short breaks and only at transitions. It was a chore for me to keep myself fueled. I’d slam water at every transition and stuff my pockets full of snacks that I consumed while trying to breath and keep up.

The ski from Thomas Fork into upper Neffs started in this chute, opened up into a meadow and finished with some fun boulder popping and whipper slaloming.

Like a well oiled machine we took turns breaking trail and didn’t make any navigational errors. The conversation ranged from the Mountain Accord Process, to gear, to any classic story involving our friend Courtney Phillips, and usually back to gear.

From Neffs we dropped into West Porter via the pass North of Mill B. Another long and untracked powder run. It was getting a little ridiculous. We figured we’d start running into more tracks in Porter and we were right. We finally got a break from trail breaking since the skinner was in to the saddle east of Mount Raymond. But, that was it, no trail from here to the summit, so we put our own in. This was a tough climb for me. We had hit the 11K mark on the day and I was sluggish. At the summit of Raymond I made sure to eat and drink plenty.

The snow just got deeper and better as we skied off the higher peaks. We hadn’t seen a soul and hadn’t skied over a single track yet. On a good pow day you usually get two or three great runs. This was our 5th and we still had two more to go.

In order to wrap around to Gobblers we skied all the way down to around 8,000ft level. We thought for sure there would be a skin track set up to Gobblers, but there wasn’t, so we put it in.

The storm that was forecast started moving in with colder temps and some wind. We didn’t stay long on top of Gobblers, but worked down the ridge to what is called East Bowl I believe.

The upper skiing was a bit scoured by the wind, Tom triggered a small sized wind pocket, but then the skiing got really good again. This lasted until we entered a gully that had slid and we had our first and only challenging turns of the day. Elliott feels his way onto the slope.

Hands were getting cold, feet were moving slow and the light was running low. Time to get the hell out of here, but not before we climbed up to the Wilson Headwall for the finish. Great fucking group of guys to get out in the mountains with. Miles of frozen smiles on top of Wilson Peak.

Tom called his girlfriend Dominique to meet us at the Millcreek gate. We ripped skins one last time and dropped into more good soft snow all the way to the road!

With almost 16K feet of climbing it was the most vert I’ve done on skis. We broke trail for over 10,000 feet, kept moving solidly for 13 hours, and most importantly we skied a silly amount of high quality powder with only crossing a few tracks. Thanks to Teague and Tom for inviting me along and putting together such a great route.