Rowdy, Adventuresome Ski Travels of the Americas; A List.

Excellent ski adventures are indeed excellent. Whether obscure, cliche or “insta-trendy”, stepping outside of your ski routine into something different is the ultimate.

I love weird adventures with amazing skiing. I’ve done some weird and amazing skiing. My tendencies lean toward the obscure, remote, human-powered, and largely stick to the Americas (the lattermost is mainly a function of my own travel patterns. Outside the Americas, all I’ve skied is the Haute Route. Hardly anyone needs to be prompted to add that to their list…)

I’ve got a list. Some ideas to stretch yourself into. Each I’ve done and most with some media to accompany. In no particular order, seven ski adventures in North and South America. Incidentally, each of these is a trip I can arrange and guide for you or your group. Each is good and, to put it mildly, I can greatly enhance each.

Teton Trifecta

Owen Leeper. Grand Teton. With the Middle and South behind him (literally) and ahead of him (figuratively).

This one is right here at home and certainly the most technical. Skiing the Grand Teton, while not “commonplace”, isn’t all that obscure. It requires a pile of special skills, impeccable timing, and a dose of luck, but it is also done with some regularity. There are now multiple people out there with double digit descents of the Grand Teton, for instance. The logical step-up and step-out, and one that involves adding much more and much better skiing, is to link the other Tetons as well. Jimmy Chin is credited with doing it first and it is still hard and obscure. But it doesn’t require anything “world class”. Season: April and May. 9000+ vertical feet of elevation gain, with much of that technical. Raise that bar! Smaller version? Skiing the Middle and South together is a great combination.

Southern Chile Volcanoes

Giant mountains, foreign-but-chill culture, and a season that perfectly complements ours. Just when you’re ski jonesing is at its max (September, October, and into early November) Southern Chile volcano ski mountaineering is at its best. The logistics are simple (flight, rental vehicle. Hotels are widely available in the off-season and Chile has very friendly camping rules and the language barrier isn’t a big deal.) Git some.

Chugach Ski Traverse

Yours truly. 2009 on the upper Nelchina Glacier. We flew in, skied a bunch of peaks and passes, and slogged to the road. Grand adventure, to put it mildly. Annie Trujillo photo.

Suffer-festing at its finest. You know the Chugach from movies, for its heli skiing, for the roadside touring of Thompson Pass, and for the weirdest “tailgate party” on earth. You should also know its spectacular mini-expedition opportunities. There are unskied peaks. There are week-long traverses. There are monumental storms and there are 5000 foot descents that flatten out in sight of but still miles above Prince William Sound. Aim for April and May. Fly to Anchorage (no, you don’t need a passport. But that doesn’t mean culture shock isn’t a possibility), stock up on featherweight food and enough stove fuel to drive your Sprinter to Coachella a time or two, charter a plane into the wilderness and figure it out from there. Well, have more of a plan than that. Whiteout navigation and glacier travel are the real deal. But so is the steep skiing and self-reliant voyaging, much of which hasn’t been touched before. The above pictured traverse is documented on the dormant server of the defunct telemarktips.com. That’s a bummer, as that trip was great and the report was memorable. I’ve done a couple other shorter Chugach Traverses, all of which match the same general description and all of which scratched that expedition itch with a minimum of hassle.

Ski a Giant AK Peak (not Denali)

While we’re in Alaska… Our 49th state’s giant mountains are legendary. The highest one is there, for instance. Denali is sweet, but few come back raving about the ski and snow quality. Like other mountains that are “the highest”, Denali gets a bump in numerical notoriety, somewhat undeserved. The good news is that the other corners of Alaska hold peaks with simply amazing ski mountaineering. Go for a tall one. The ten tallest peaks in Alaska are taller than anything in the Lower 48. Size matters. If skiing is good, more skiing is better. Skiing Saint Elias was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. But it’s a long shot, to put it mildly. Mount Sanford is another way cool ski peak, with better weather and more manageable logistics and hazards. April, May, or June.

Sierra Springtime Couloir Hunting

When you think of couloirs, you need to think of California’s Sierra Nevada. A couloir anywhere else is, shoot, just a chute.

Camp out, wake early, walk to that ribbon of snow. Skin in the dark, crampon up the hallway, summit photo, ski down. Eat early afternoon high class restaurant food, soak in a hot spring, set up a new camp, and then repeat. This is the Sierra ski mountaineering rhythm. When it is good (and if California doesn’t have steady weather, who does?) it is the best damn ski mountaineering on the planet. The small towns along US Route 395 have all the amenities you need, and many you didn’t even know you wanted. The desert camping is unparalleled. I could go on and on, just like the list of ski lines goes on and on. The whole ski season can work, but if you really want to stack the odds in your favor, watch the January storm reports from Mammoth Mountain. If they get 10 feet or more in January, take the last week of April off, stock up on sunscreen and some skinny skis, and rage.

Lake Louise Ski Mountaineering

Icefields Parkway (upper left of photo). But not ice skiing. Powder couloirs, roadside peaks, and epic traverses.

A human-powered ski trip based in Lake Louise Alberta is roughly analogous to a ski mountaineering trip in California. The Canadian Rockies and California both have ski resorts and a devout following. But neither is their country’s most highly regarded backcountry ski destination. This is off base, in both cases. As compared to Canada’s “other” backcountry ski destinations (Whistler, Kootenays, Revelstoke), the peaks along the Ice Fields Parkway are readily day-tripped (from comfortable, quiet, readily available accommodations), uncrowded, steep, with giant relief. No year-long wait lists for hut space, no special classes required, no rain, no dense forest slogs, no chance of highway avalanche closures. No other Canadian destination matches the entirety of that description. I’ve made it happen from early March through mid May. But April is probably best. Fly to Calgary and be in a hotel in Lake Louise within hours. Wake the next morning and drive 5-50 minutes to one of dozens of 4000+ foot roadside lines. Do it on a whim. Do it with a posse. Do it with your kids and family. But just do it.

Peruvian Peaks

This is definitely the most obscure on the list. Despite all the ski footage above, there isn’t all that much skiing in Peru. Mark and Janelle and I have explored many corners of the Cordillera Blanca. We have skied on four major peaks there. And scouted even more. Really, there are 2-3 good ski peaks in the whole country. But those have tall runs, unreal culture, and you are literally in the tropics. Just tying your skis to a donkey is worth the price of admission. Doing so in order to ski to and from 6000 meters is the icing on the cake, like those Cordillera Blanca glaciers are the icing on the Andes. You can see the upper reaches of the Amazon rainforest from these most chill of expedition peaks. I wrote some words on the zone for WildSnow. Plan your trip for May or June. Go with maximum gut health; our soft bellies aren’t accustomed to tropical bugs…