First Day of the 19/20 Season. Mount Rose, NV
The 2019/2020 Backcountry Ski season kicked off for me today. June 17 feels like forever ago and damn, a lot has happened since my last day on the skins...namely, the car accident that damn near took my life. Let’s just say, I’m stoked as hell to be alive, and it’s a complete bonus to ski fresh pow in the Backcountry.
Today the alarm rang at 5:00am but really I was up and eager at about 4:58am. Excitement took ahold of the sleep hours and I didn’t even notice the lack of z’s. Coffee poured and out the door, I drove the new Subaru (no plates, no worries) and scooped up Conor and Will around 6am. The original crew was made up of 6 but storm conditions and rising avalanche danger trimmed it down to the 3 of us.
We got to Sky Tavern Resort off of Mt. Rose Hwy at about 6:45am and on snow just before 7:00am. With avalanche risk in mind we talked over the conditions, what our thought processes were, and all agreed that low-angle, treed skiing, would be our best bet. We had been following the weather for days, so we had a good idea of what the snowpack looked like and aware that our main risk would be Wind/Storm Slab.
Conor set the track all the way up to the Mt. Rose East Shoulder where after examining the snow all the way up, we decided a summit ascent/descent was a no-go. We didn’t want to climb up the cross (wind) loaded steep slope to get to the summit.
In this photo: Will Scharf and Conor Phelan rip skins on the Mount Rose shoulder.
At this point we decided to rip our skins and head NE down the face, into some trees, and towards Chocolate Mountain. Fun descent with variable wind-impacted powder. We continued down to our drainage where we skied two more laps up and down through beautiful open fields and trees.
Stoked on a fantastic day out, some beautiful Nevada/California views, and the opportunity to learn more (especially uphill travel on higher avalanche risk days).
In this photo: One stoked dude.
Happy to be alive and skiing!