Finding Treasure in the Tetons

I just spent 10 days in the Tetons teaching an instructor training seminar for NOLS, doing some really amazing riding while training a new generation of backcountry snowboarding instructors. With all the time we spent skinning and riding, my trainees were pretty impressed at the performance of my Wagner Custom approach skis, and how easy my transitions were compared to their splitboards. 50cm of new snow graced us over the first few days, and after seeing the start to our season’s snowpack it was really nice to see stability improve around here, opening up the big lines that were too dangerous before. On our last tour day I went down the far north ridge of Treasure Mountain with five of our riders to explore an avalanche path up there.

We made our way along the heavily corniced ridgeline under overcast skies, cutting one HUGE cornice to test the slope below–no reaction under hundreds of pounds of impact made us feel pretty good about the situation. Test pits near the starting zone of our intended path confirmed good stability, so we punched the gut in fast powder, riding one-at-a-time from safe zone to safe zone. (Practicing good down-guiding technique.) Big rooster tails ripping through little trees in steep terrain had everybody grinning and whooping, and the turns just kept coming. We finally reached the bench at the “bottom” of our run when I realized that we were standing at the top of a shot that I had been eyeing for a couple of years from the skateski track below. It was pure luck that we ended up right on top of it, with perfect conditions and a group of strong riders. Awesome.

The Boy Scout Couloir is so named because it is the only clean line through the 400′ limestone cliff above the Treasure Mountain boy scout camp. Steep, narrow, and perfectly plumb, the couloir is a deep and beautiful cleft through towering rock walls. Ultimately, the reason that I hadn’t ridden it before was because of the long access and the difficulty of finding it from above. But with us camped on the summit of Treasure Mountain, we were perfectly set up for a descent and didn’t even know it. It would mean a long skin back to camp, but what better way to wrap up this trip?

After describing the couloir to my tour group they jumped at the chance to ride it, so I took over the down-guiding and we rode up to the lip to scout the entrance. We found a little sneak above some rocks to access a dozen 50-degree turns into the meat of the couloir–beautiful. Once everybody was grouped up inside the couloir, I rode firm, fun powder to a good spotting zone just above the rock portal at the exit and gave the team the thumbs-up to ride it out one-at-a-time. They made fast, controlled turns, leaving cold crystal rooster tails, opening it up once they hit the fan at the exit. Once they were safely through and into the forest below, I aired off my perch and rode out to join them. Big smiles, lots of high-fives and general giddyness ensued.

We rode down through a bit more forested terrain to the bottom of the canyon and transitioned for the skin back up. After 8 days of winter camping, everybody was a bit fatigued and really hungry, but super stoked to finish the trip with a line like that. The 5-hour skin back up (splitboard skins can be a nightmare) took a circuitous route up Eddington Canyon and past the Eddington Chutes. (We had ridden those a couple of days earlier.) We watched the sun set over the Big Holes just as we climbed a bootpack through the rock band at the top of the Treasure Mountain massif, the sky turning lava red. Dusk fell into dark as we rolled back into camp, spent but happy, ready for a huge dinner feed and looking forward to going home to family and friends.

Skinning out of the mountains with our camp in the sled behind me, I became acutely aware of the caliber of the backcountry snowboarding program that we’ve created at NOLS. If you’re a snowboarder and you want to take your riding to the next level in the backcountry, I would definitely consider taking a course–you’d be amazed at the experience.

Tags: Add new tag, backcountry snowboarding, Snowboard, snowboard mountaineering, snowboard safety