Popular Stories
Today was the pinnacle of a lifetime of snowboarding for me. Hope was starting to slip away earlier in the day.. The wind has stripped almost all aspects of snow. We finally make it to the one bowl that we think is holding snow; the lines we want to hit are heavier then we thought and render us speechless once we get close to them. Big ice, bigger cornices, gnarly hikes and sharp spines.
Rice had seen enough and he called in the plane to take him back to the real world after 25 days in camp. Ryland listens to his gut and joins the camera men on the island of safety, while Jonaven and I slowly push ahead into the mix. Armed with a pole in one hand, an axe in the other and a rope tying us together, we poke and prod our way through a series of cracks and bergshrunds.
Once on the face, we trade off leads making sure only one off us is exposed at a time. Jonaven finds his high point, as I turn the corner and climb a dogleg chute to the summit. The exposure was off the charts. It was like we were at a sandwich bar of hazards and checked the “works” box and paid the extra 99 cents to have it super sized. We were on the edge of our comfort zone, but still in it. The whole time we talked about the possibility of turning back, but the higher we got, the better we felt.
The weather looked like it was going to screw us again and it was not until I got to the summit that things started opening up for the first time in hours. It is a hard call to make when the weather is mixed bag. It takes about 4 hours to get on top of a line and at some point you just have to go and hope the afternoon clearing happens. This is why you better enjoy the process, because many days we put in a full days of work and came home empty handed when it came to getting shots.
Yesterday we got skunked, but I think the weather Gods rewarded us for our persistence and opened up the skies and gave us a 10-minute weather window for the line of the trip. We found powder and it changed everything. We were able to hit the throttle high on the face and mach through spines with total control.
The last four days have been hard. It has been decent weather, but we have struggled with high temps, wind and clouds. Today made up for all that. It required us to use all our mountain skills to achieve our goal. We were big mountain riding on a level I have never done before. We live, breath and touch these lines for hours or even days on end and it results in a high I have never felt before.
**The first day we went to this zone, we got turned back. It was way further than we thought. We were too late to run the gauntlet that required 7 snow bridge crossings. We ended up calling it Boris Basin after Greg Todds.**
**Our camp looks small beneath these mountains.**
**The view of Boris Basin from home. We estimated the cornice to be 150 feet tall and 200 feet wide. We called it Moby Dick.**
**The possey trying to make sense of the craziness. This was our one island of safety. We would head out around 10 to get through the ice before things heated up. Once here, we would take a long break before heading into "tiger country." These lines were North West facing and did not get light until 5 or 6PM.**
**Blu Fox calling it a trip after 25 days! What a session. Snowboarding is in good hands with Travis Rice at the helm. Mega props to TR for spending a month with us in the prime of the season, in the prime of his career.**
**Ryland Bell is dazed and confused at the sight of Boris Basin.**
**Boris Basin. We hit the spines to the lookers right. I came into the spine wall from a long chute that comes off the summit.**
**The Deeper crew skins into the hills.**
Join Our Newsletter
**Touch and go wall. This had us perplexed from the start and consumed me for days on end. It reminded me a lot of the TB spines in Tahoe but 4 or 5 times the length.**
**The view from the bottom. I had to burrow up between spines. The runnels were rock hard and required dry tooling, front pointing and stemming. The main crux was at the very bottom and took a half hour to pull through 8 feet. I would have never done the moves if it was higher on the face.**
**At the top of Touch and Go Wall. I am excited to have made a climb I thought I had no chance of making, but I am still very puckered about the descent.**
**Jonaven enjoying the fruits of his labor.**
**Heading home.**
**My Home for the month. Thanks Black Diamond.**
**RIding Log. A major melt down caused us to pull the plug. By 7 AM the mountains were all ready starting to come down. We had a few more lines left to hit, but it is always nice to leave a couple on the table.**
**Next Year?**
