Ocean from shipwreck

http://www.iredale.de/maritime/peter1.htm This the web site where there are photos of the Peter Iredale before it went down and right after in 1906 as well as one from 1999.

Snowpack Profile Update

There is 17" of new snow on the ground since the extreme avalanche conditions and avalanche activity earlier this week. The forecast is calling for 12-18" tonight and 7-11" on Saturday with the possibility of more snow on Sunday.





Neither a compression test or extended column test yielded any failures. No evidence of recent avalanche activity in the immediate area allows me to think that the slope did not fail earlier in the week, unlike many other slopes in the area.





All layers were well defined and fairly settled.

Snow Worm

After A Bath

This is Stormy. He was yawning after getting the spa treatment. I gave him a good bath. He looked so shiny and cute.

Fall Aspens

We took a trip to the Jemez Mountains last week to see if any of the aspen trees leaves were turning that nice shade of yellow they turn in the fall. there were lots of beautiful trees. And there was one squirrel that wanted his photo taken. These squirrels are called Abert or tassle eared squirrles.

your last chance at free gear for a month!

Tomorrow at midnight I'll draw a member's number and give away your choice of aBlue Ice Warthog or a Octopuss pack. But you must be a member of the blog to get drawn.

chouinard ice poster

My long time climbing partner has an original Chouinard poster (this one in fact) for sale if anyone is interested. If so you can leave a bid in the comments.



super topo comments here:



http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/2200762/Chouinard-Ice-poster

Erling Stordahl ..

Jennifer and I went out again for some Nordic turns. The weather was colder and wetter than on Saturday but we persisted, hoping it would be drier once we were on the east side of the crest. It was moderately drier, and we left the car in a light rain/mist to check out the trails.

We paid extra for these level of trail grooming?

While it appears the main snowmobile road was groomed. When we got off it and headed toward Trollhaugen the grooming wasn't quite right. It appears they did attempt to groom, but only made one pass and that bare boots and four wheeled vehicles destroyed it somewhat. Past Trollhaugen the grooming effort was more obvious, but still wasn't up to par. We reached the same point in the woods we had last time and proceeded to follow other skiers tracks in the woods which returned us to the "groomed" section after a short loop.

Skiers tracks in the woods

We started heading back to the car on a different set of skiers tracks and then took a turn to make our trip a little longer. (At this point the rain was changing to a wintry mix.) After a bit of fun easy terrain, we got to a hill. I was inclined to turn around and call it quits when a family came down the hill. I asked the teenage girl what was that way and she responded with "fun hills." So I asked Jennifer is she wanted to turn around or continue, and we decided on continuing.

We climbed up a hill for a bit and then were on rolling terrain before tackling a larger hill. Then we had the task of descending the large hill which neither of us were up to. If it was groomed we would have had better success, but Jennifer took off her skis and walked it. While I sidestepped parts and tried to snowplow other sections. After a few falls we were back on more level terrain that we knew where we were. At this point is was full on snowing and we just headed back to the car.

Happier now the snow is falling.

This was a good workout with the uphills, but I'm still not ready for those types of downhills without grooming on skinny skis. Not sure why the grooming was so bad and incomplete. There was certainly enough snow for it. I'm guessing the grooming won't be right there until January.