I’m breaking blogging silence with some very good news. This morning Jackson Hole ski resort president Jerry Blann announced the resort would sell its unlimited season pass for $1255 until August 31st. That’s a drop of 25% from last year’s ridiculous price. A long, long overdue return to sanity for a resort with a huge [...]
I’m a partisan of this little boutique mountain range in Northwest Wyoming called the Tetons. Sure, they’re pretty, and pretty photogenic, but as a skier I know them to be the home some of the best skiing in North America, and as I’ve recently argue, the key to great skiing is great snow, or at [...]
Ok, maybe the good folks at Jackson Hole wouldn’t pass a graph making class, (how many bar graphs start below the zero bound?), but we’ll take good news in any form we can get it in a poor snow winter. Vive la Tetons!
Thursday night it was standing room only at the Wort Hotel in Jackson when the Jackson Hole Historical Association hosted an evening with Pepi Stiegler and Tommy Moe reminiscing about their lives as skiers and Olympic champions. Both men succeeded in landing jobs in Jackson many years ago because they were Olympic champions, but neither [...]
Please read Michael Pearlman’s excellent post Ski Patroller Death Highlights the Real Price of Powder Turns on New West about the ski patrollers we too often take granted. It is sad that it takes the loss of one of these very professional and dedicated people to remind us that they risk their lives so we [...]
A couple of days ago I suggested that skiers venturing off trail to ski steeper powdery slopes within a resort’s normally avalanche controlled boundaries would be wise to wear avalanche transceivers and carry a shovel and a probe pole just as if they were heading into the backcountry. Here’s why…Three significant avalanches where triggered by [...]
I presume Mr. Wolling and his ski patrol partner were following standard procedures that have been preformed hundreds of times over the years to stabilize the snow in Cheyenne Bowl. If that assumption is correct, then we can assume that this year’s snowpack is extremely treacherous, causing a release capable of trapping and nearly killing a very experienced patroller doing normally safe and standard procedure avalanche control duties.
When all is said and done, skiing (and snowboarding) us all about the snow. Its is not about how new or expensive our gear is, or how fancy a resort we’re skiing at, or how great we think we look in our new parka, or how steep a pitch we just aced, what it is [...]
Remember last year at this time? The Tetons were getting pounded with heavy snows and the avalanche danger was insane. There was an inbounds avalanche fatality at Jackson and another avalanche partially buried several of their ski patrol members and damaged an on-mountain restaurant. The danger was so high Jackson had to keep much of [...]
I live near Jackson Hole and every year I toy with the idea of buying a season pass there, but I balk at its price tag, this year it is $1970. If I took advantage of its summer price discount I’d pay only $1675. If I skied 50 days I’d end up paying about $33 [...]
