2012 Montana Conditions, Stoke and Whatev Thread

[Harry]

Work in progress on Ramcharger 8.

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

CC is shaping up nice. Another dig day there on 10/27. My KOM on Boss Tweed got smoked today it looks like. Damn. This weather is unreal.

[Harry]

This weather is unreal.

No kidding. We always get an Indian Summer in October, but this year it seems better. No idea what the stats are, it just seems better. Hiked up to the Garnet Mountain Fire Lookout today.

[Climber Joe]

No kidding. We always get an Indian Summer in October, but this year it seems better. No idea what the stats are, it just seems better. Hiked up to the Garnet Mountain Fire Lookout today.

No joke. My chaco tan is back.

[Bunion 2020]

9:15 and I have the windows open.

[nest]

I also would be down to either host or help organize a get together. There are plenty of mags in town these days, it would be fun to get together.

I would like to drink beer and meet some new people

[WMD]

Halfway up the Blackmore Trail. I think some of this snow is here to stay, which is a bummer. It would be great if it would all melt and then the ground would freeze before it snows again.

[SUPERIOR]

I too, am new.

Anyone want to meet at the Tap Room on Thursday and have an old fashioned shoot the shit?

Other ideas?

[Trainwreck]

Although the recent weather has me more focused on getting the horses out and my (pathetic) attempts at fly fishing, I bought a midweek BB pass.

Would be good to meet some local mags since I left the old crew behind in CO. Hit me up.

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

Will be skiing a lot at BS again this winter. Haven't pulled trigger on a Bridger pass of any sort yet. If anything I will get a mid week. Down to ski with mags early and often.

[East2West]

New to the area also. Got the Bridger pass and will be trying to get a bunch of midweek/weekend days in with some tours. Up for meeting for beers or laps.

[idahospud]

It's too warm out, but riding out to Triple Tree on the new trail this evening was pretty swell. It'd have been a bit more swell if I'd remembered lights, but oh well.

Seems like the general consensus is everybody wants to ski and/or drink beer and talk about skiing. I like Superior's plan of the Tap Room on Thursday. Does after 5 work?

[concretejungle]

It can stay like this until after Thanksgiving if it wants.

I can’t make this Thursday but keep posting up and I’ll make one. BB pass is purchased.

[Bunion 2020]

^^^ This, early snow is a PITA.

[nest]

Cant make it thursday but down to meet up if another gathering materializes

[Harry]

Indian Summer = officially over. Socked in up here, rain & fog. But what a beautiful couple of weeks we have had.

Lifts start spinning in 29 days.

[Bunion 2020]

Nah.... it was clearing when I left. Nice in Bozeman today and through sundown tomorrow then a shitty weekend.

I'm planning one more afternoon at CC tomorrow PM, then a good time to finish some kitchen/laundry room work. Shelves and storage.

Looks like golf season is over though.

Next week looks hit & miss.

https://atmos.washington.edu/mm5rt/r...45.79N,111.15W

If the green goes to the bottom it generally indicates Precip. of one form or another.

And NOAA says:

Short Range:

MTZ055-242200-
Gallatin-
Including the cities of Bozeman and Gallatin Gateway
803 AM MDT Wed Oct 24 2018

.REST OF TODAY...Partly cloudy early in the morning then
clearing. Highs 50 to 60. Southwest winds up to 10 mph.
.TONIGHT...Colder. Partly cloudy in the evening then becoming
mostly cloudy. Lows 30 to 40. Southwest winds up to 10 mph.
.THURSDAY...Mostly cloudy in the morning then becoming partly
cloudy. Highs 50 to 60. West winds up to 10 mph increasing to
10 to 15 mph in the afternoon.
.THURSDAY NIGHT...Partly cloudy. Lows 30 to 40. Southwest winds
5 to 10 mph.
.FRIDAY...Mostly cloudy. Slight chance of rain showers and snow
showers in the morning, then chance of rain showers in the
afternoon. Highs 50 to 60. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph increasing
to 10 to 20 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation
40 percent.
.FRIDAY NIGHT...Mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of rain
showers. Lows 35 to 40.
.SATURDAY...Partly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of rain
showers and snow showers. Highs 45 to 55.
.SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY...Partly cloudy. Lows 25 to 35. Highs
50 to 60.
.SUNDAY NIGHT...Mostly cloudy. Lows 30 to 35.
.MONDAY...Mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of rain showers
and snow showers. Highs 50 to 60.
.MONDAY NIGHT AND TUESDAY...Colder. Mostly cloudy with a
50 percent chance of snow showers and rain showers. Lows 25 to
35. Highs 35 to 45.

Long Range:

...VALID WED OCT 31 TO TUE NOV 6...

EAST OF CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
TEMPERATURES......BELOW NORMAL
PRECIPITATION.....ABOVE NORMAL

WEST OF CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
TEMPERATURES......BELOW NORMAL
PRECIPITATION.....ABOVE NORMAL

NORMAL TEMPERATURES FOR THIS PERIOD IN MONTANA
HIGHS 40 TO THE LOWER 50S.
LOWS IN THE MID TEENS TO THE LOWER 30S.

[Bobcat Sig]

Whoa, Ram Charger is getting replaced?! Nice.

What about Swifty?

In any case, aiming for a February trip. If it lines up, I'd like to ski with some of you.

[Bunion 2020]

Swifty will continue to be the weak link and only way to the main mountain, at least for this season unless you ride explorer to Challenger or 6-shooter to Challenger.

Almost forgot, I would love to get together and make a few turns with the starter of this most excellent thread.

My new next door neighbor pulled me aside the other day and inquired if I might frequent this board and thread. I plead guilty as charged. Small world.....

RTR, quit lurking and say hello to your imaginary friends.

[GSinister]

Whoa, Ram Charger is getting replaced?! Nice.

What about Swifty?

In any case, aiming for a February trip. If it lines up, I'd like to ski with some of you.

I'm interested in your Lhasa Pows, Bobcat, but I can't even send a PM anymore. I guess I should post rather then just read. PM me if you can/want to. Thanks!

[bushman]

I'm interested in your Lhasa Pows, Bobcat, but I can't even send a PM anymore. I guess I should post rather then just read. PM me if you can/want to. Thanks!

Way to beat the min post requirement to score in gearswap. I'd sell to ya, cash up front of course.

[Norseman]

Google Map

[Bunion 2020]

It was just about 15 years ago today that reality sank in and it became clear that unless a planet killing asteroid managed to pull off a miracle shot we would be opening for skiing in about a month.

I was working at a new ski area startup called Moonlight Basin and it was our inaugural season.

Located on the north side of Lone Mountain in the Madison Range of SW Montana the announcement of a competing ski area going head to head against established Big Sky ski resort surprised most people when it was announced in June of 2002. I had heard rumors for the past 6 months, was interviewed for the Patrol Directors job in April and hired as the Assistant Patrol Director/Snow Safety Director in late May. I had been interviewed for the job at the same time as a guy name John Knapton. The GM who interviewed both of us was torn over who to choose so he took the ball and ran by hiring us both.

The previous fall I had been planning on returning to Big Sky where I was the Snow Safety Director. I was working construction that summer and took a week off to spend my 45th birthday in Yellowstone Park chasing trout and enjoying what used to be a quiet time to visit the park. When I got out I had a message to contact my manager at Big Sky. I did so and he told me he and the Mountain Manager wanted to meet with me. I had always gotten along with the Patrol Director (Red Duck Leader) fairly well although I didn’t think much of him as a leader in spite of his duckiness. The Mountain Manager was another story, he and I had clashed at times and we just did not mesh.

I had sent the Duck a short letter describing some changes I had in mind for my position, mainly no longer wanting to be on salary (50-60 hrs a week in a high stress job was wearing thin). He took the letter wrong and went to the Mountain Manager with it.

When I went into the meeting I could sense some tension. It quickly became apparent they were ready to make a change alright, that included changing the Snow Safety Director. I kept my cool for the most part and when faced with what was going to happen I wish them well and left. It was September, I had planned on working at that ski area for the winter. By then most areas are fully hired so going to another ski area wasn’t in the cards. It had been a lucrative summer so I kept doing carpentry, bought a season pass and went skiing with the idea that I would decide if I was done patrolling or had another ski area in me.

Around Christmas I arranged for my employer to lay me off, went on unemployment and skied a lot. It was a pretty good season, I had a good time and in late February a friend who was the Patrol Director at a nearby Millionaires ski area asked me to fill out the season for a patroller who didn’t work out. That area was still small but growing, had a small staff and no skiers to speak of. A big day might be 3-400 skiers on 2500 acres and very few of them went up on that areas advanced terrain. At the end of the season I had enjoyed it enough that I decided that ski patrolling still held its attractions. But that area wasn’t going to be it.

That is when Burt came calling. Burt was/is kind an old school legend in the ski business, he had been with American Skiing during their heyday and helped build Sunday River to its pinnacle. He was sent west to develop the Canyons outside of Park City for ASC and became another sort of a legend, known for putting in lifts for a year or so on one profile and then taking them down and moving them to another profile. Like so many ski area developers ASC eventually crashed and Burt was out of a job. Enter Moonlight Basin.

In the early 90s a guy named Lee Poole (RIP) and 2 partners bought 26,000 acres of land north of Lone Mountain near Big Sky with an eye towards developing something although I am not sure they knew what that would eventually become. In 1995 during the construction of the Lone Peak Tram and without much notice Moonlight Basin Ranch was opened and built some condos and cabins and installed the Iron Horse lift with an agreement by Big Sky that they would operate and maintain the terrain and a sort of partnership has begun between Big Sky and Moonlight Basin. A year later another more real estate oriented lift was built and Moonlight Basin began building higher end homes and condos and a nice new lodge.

By 2001 the relationship had reached an uneasy sort of a balance and for reasons still not known to me Moonlight Basin made the decision that instead of adding more lifts and letting Big Sky operate them they were going to do their own ski area. Needless to say when this was announced in May of 2002 the folks at Big Sky had a shit fit.

Both John and I started work on June 6th 2002 and went about creating a ski patrol from scratch. Between getting set up as an EMS non-transport agency and getting a BATF explosives license in a post 9/11 age we were pretty busy. We had a sort of a budget but for the most part we were just asked to put together how much it would cost to cover the terrain we had available for the 2002/03 season. The one wild card was Nashville Basin.

Nashville Basin had been managed for skiing for the past several years by Big Sky as hike to terrain accessible from the top of the Challenger lift. To ski it you had to have a beacon and shovel, sign in with the patrol and agree to some strict terrain management guidelines. The terrain is steep, cliff strewn and north facing with historically weak and shallow snow and the scene of several near misses.

When John and I were hired we were pretty clear that we wanted to keep that terrain open from the outset. What surprised the hell out of me was that Burt felt the same way in spite of the risk and the expense. Even more surprising was the Lee Poole also wanted it open. The guy was a total novice skier but he loved the idea that people could and would ski such insane terrain.

So I was given my prime directive, develop a terrain and avalanche management plan that would allow for some skiing in the basin using the personnel I was allotted, 6 patrollers a day with a full staff of 10. To further complicate matters, we didn’t have any lift access. I mentioned that Big Sky had a shit fit that is a mild understatement. They pretty rapidly filed a lawsuit over contractual agreements for property management and terrain that they now claimed as their own. They made it abundantly clear that we were a separate ski area and that there would be no access to their lifts from our terrain and no use of their lifts to access our terrain. That left me with just one option, to access terrain and get it open we would hike.

Early on our marketing department (1 guy) began to change names of terrain. At first I was a bit hesitant that we would change Nashville Basin to Headwaters but as I got to experience what Big Sky was all about it became clear that he was 100% correct. Fuck them.

We experienced a body blow in July when a full property survey was made of the complex and often ridiculous property lines on Lone Mountain. The lines had been determined during a complicated land swap that had happened more than 10 years ago and made the acquisition of the land that eventually became Moonlight Basin possible. Before the survey was completed we had been joking around that it would be funny if the top of the Challenger lift was actually on Moonlight property. At the time of the survey the crew building the new 6-Shooter lift had poured concrete for lift towers almost to the top of where the lift would unload and the top terminal was staked for excavation. The day of the survey I and another patroller (Alex) were building what is now the Patrol Headquarters just west of the top of 6-Shooter. The surveys guys came hiking by and I joked with them about the top of Challenger and whose land it was on. They solemnly replied that no, the top of Challenger was really on Big Sky land. And so is the top of your new lift. What the fuck!

It turns out that whoever it was that decided to stick the center stake into the ground and choose the spot for the top terminal blew it by about 10 feet. Of course when the survey results were announced the folks from Big Sky smiling said “no problem, just move it over off our land.” There were some negotiations that went nowhere and even more hard feelings developed. We had already poured the bottom terminal and changing the profile at that late date was out of the question. If you ride 6-Shooter and bother to look the lift takes a slight bend at tower 23/24 , just enough to unload off to the wet of what was Big Sky property.

It also turned out that Moonlight Basin owned the land that allows for access to the Big Cooler off the summit of Lone Mountain. We could have said, “oh yeah, right. Tough Shit”. To his credit Lee didn’t want to screw over the local skiers so that card was not played.

[Bunion 2020]

By September John and I had recruited and hired our staff for the winter. That was the easy part, the hard part was choosing between all the potential candidates who seemed to revel in the idea of sticking a thumb in the eye of Big Sky. It was right around then that the Avalauncher arrived and we began putting in the gun mount.

An Avalauncher is a compressed air cannon powered by nitrogen gas fed through a regulator and capable of shooting a 1 kilo projectile 3000 feet with some accuracy, it is NOT artillery. When the Big Sky staff got wind of the Avalauncher they really freaked out even though they never bothered to actually talk to any of us about our procedures.

Usually Avalaunchers are used to lob shots long distances at a 40-45 degree trajectory. I had sighted ours well up a ridge so that we could shoot fairly flat trajectory shots at high pressures and eliminate the possibility of an overshoot that would land on the Big Sky side of the ridge. Test shots showed me that this was a workable solution and was incorporated into our Avalanche plan. I tried talking to Big Sky Snow Safety members about what we were up to but they would not/could not discuss it.

In November our patrol was invited to attend the annual SWMT Ski Patrol avalanche workshop at Bridger Bowl. Had it been scheduled at Big Sky I am pretty sure the invite would have been lost in the mail. I gave a PowerPoint presentation outlining our avalanche control program and how we were going to manage our terrain. At the end of the 15 minute spiel I asked if there were any questions. I was met with a stunned silence for about 30 seconds before Doug (BBSP Snow Safety) was kind enough to toss me a couple of softballs and that in turn unleashed a spirited discussion. The 40 or so patrollers from Big Sky were mostly silent.

About that plan. I divided the Headwaters in 4 Zones. 0 through 3. We would hike and control Zone 0 (Headwaters Bowl, Alder Gulch and Cold Spring). Once that was opened and skied and if conditions allowed the next day we would then hike and control and open Zone 1 (Firehole and Hellroaring). If conditions still allowed and we remained in stable weather we would then hike and control and open Zone 2 (Jack Creek and Rock Creek). The Holy Grail was Zone 3 which was Whitetail and 3 Forks. I was pretty sure we would never get there during the 1st season. Turns out I was wrong and we were able to get that Zone open 4 or 5 times during year 1.

To say the plan was ambitious is gilding the lily more than a little bit. The hike to the top of Challenger is a steep 800’ up rocky scree and took us about 25 minutes under good conditions with steps already kicked in. On a storm morning it was an hour of hard work with heavy packs and because we could not rely on our neighbors for any backup if something went wrong it was intimidating as hell.

When we were setting up our rescue caches for the Headwaters area (Rescue Toboggan’s and First Aid gear) a couple of sympathetic friends from the Big Sky Patrol accidentally skied off with our gear and a bunch of it ended up getting transported up Challenger. Unfortunately the Big Sky GM happened to catch wind of the happy accident and the little twerp made an issue of it, but that is a story for later, as is the rest of the story.

Stay tuned.

[detuned]

great read, i don't know the history of BS/MB so this was enlightening - no idea there was such animosity there