Op-Ed: Sh*tf*ck Conditions Need to Be Skied Too

"Concerningly stairlike" sastrugi makes for great climbing. The skiing? That's for you to decide. | Max Ritter photo.

“I think this bootpack might be the best part of our whole day,” I half-joked to my ski partner Max, who was working hard not to roll his eyes as we booted up a narrow couloir in the Tetons that from afar we had deemed “chalky.”

Wind howled up the leg vents in my ski pants as I kicked steps up concerningly stairlike sastrugi, which was proving to be an excellent surface for my crampon teeth. Getting back down this devastatingly knobby surface with an ounce of self respect would likely be a hit to my ego, but luckily we had at least 45 more minutes until we had to confront the unfortunate tug of gravity.

The snow finally petered out and we ducked off into a wind scoop and (reluctantly) prepared to descend. “If you take a video of me skiing down this I might break up with you,” I said flatly as we transitioned. “We could always downclimb,” proposed Max, whose body language as he pulled off his second crampon suggested an imminent colonoscopy rather than making turns down a 1,000-foot couloir in the Tetons that we’d been eyeing for two seasons.

There were a lot of underwhelming snow surfaces in the Tetons last year. Name an undesirable texture, we had it. We hacked our way down lumpy wind-jacked slopes, dug tips while trying to drive through sun warmed crusts, side-slipped bulletproof couloirs, and savored the tiniest victories in the form of a few silky windbuffed turns.

High-durometer surface conditions. | Lily Krass photo.

In short, I spent a lot of time feeling like a pretty bad skier. For some reason we kept optimistically checking the weather, gearing up, and trying again. “How to ski breakable crust,” was a real Google search we spent a few hours perusing one night, trying to get psyched for the following day’s “adventure.” (It did introduce us to the jet turn, which was almost worth it for a season of sh*tf*ck).

I couldn’t tell if we were idiots or just optimists—perhaps a healthy balance of both. After a fair amount of backcountry beatdowns, I started to notice a certain beauty in scraping our way through some of the most evil snow textures imaginable. Pockmarked windboard, sunbaked breakable crust, thick ankle-deep mank, petrified tree bombs, upside down storm snow, wicked sastrugi, refrozen mashed potatoes, and even two-foot high penitentes of almost slush. Sometimes, it’s not quite the combo of water molecules we dream of, but whatever’s underfoot, it’s still hard not to crack a grin while still sliding down a mountain on two planks of wood.

I remember each of those days and the partners who made them palatable far better than the endless storm days of the season prior. Powder days blur together. Battling bunk snow deep in the backcountry is an experience you’ll never forget. Besides, if we hedged our bets and twiddled our thumbs waiting for perfect conditions, think of all the days we wouldn’t have gone skiing. Now that would be a real problem.

Caught between a rock and a hard, three-dimensional place high on a PNW volcano. | Lily Krass photo.

Back in the Tetons, we gritted our teeth and hopped, slipped, and stepped our way out of the narrowest portion of our elevator of despair, a dismal texture with deep gouges that gave me a new sense of respect for what the wind could do to an anemic snowpack.

After the longest and most ungraceful “turns” of my life, we were treated to a chattery concrete-like bed surface on the apron, which in this economy felt like boot top powder compared to the horrific undulations from above. We regrouped at the bottom, shared a halfhearted high five, and fell into a fit of childlike laughter.

Bad skiing is still skiing. And it’s never not fun.