Greetings Ice Climbers….. It has been a wild week for the early season ice in California. Very cold days with brittle ice and arctic winds, some fresh new moisture in the form of rain, and warm cascade temps have given our ice the full spectrum of conditions this week. Overall there is fun ice to be climbed in all of the standard venues. The ice continues to be thin in places, and during the warmer spells not well bonded …
Eastern Sierra Ice Report – December 2nd, 2016
Above photo: Viren Perumal leading up Roadside Left (12/2/2016) – A. Barber Welcome to December Early Season Ice. We are excited about our first of many Ice Reports for the 2016/2017 season. Keep checking back for updates and photos and videos throughout the season. The days are getting short meaning long nights with below freezing temps. Throughout the country we have been seeing posts of early season ice climbing in places like the Canadian Rockies, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado….But for Californian …
Eastern Sierra Backcountry Snow Report – December 1, 2016
Hello backcountry enthusiasts! Rock-tober becomes Snow-vember, and suddenly here we are, at the start of another backcountry season in the Eastern Sierra. We hope you all enjoyed that other part of the year where the remaining snow is generally unfit for sliding around on, assuming you have stayed here in the Northern hemisphere. Perhaps without the lure of backcountry snowsport, you were able to finally get some work done around the house, spend time with the family, and focus on your …
SkiMo is neither.
If you appreciate words, like I do, you may on occasion grieve the loss of them. Our culture changes and so too does our language. Handheld communication devices incentivize us to seek to conserve increasingly in demand stores of linguistic energy to create more time in our lives. We are quick to embrace language shortcuts like lol, lmfao, and cul8r. These abbreviated sentences, when used effectively, can save valuable seconds that grow to minutes, that add up to hours, days, …
Alpine Conditions Report – August 6th, 2016
Hi mountain folk, We are in the full steamy heat of the summer season. Climate change is real and we have seen multiple days in the past month with high temperatures in Bishop above 105 degrees. Some days in the mountains have felt too hot and lately I have not had any need to zip myself completely into a 40 degree sleeping bag, even at elevations up to 12k’. It’s been a good summer though. More snow around in early season …
Talkin’ Sh*t about Mount Whitney. Can you handle it?
People are saying I have been talking shit too much, so I decided to write some shit down instead. Let’s think of this as my periodic colon cleanse for the mind. It ain’t pretty, but it is probably healthy. The thing is, we should all be talking about poop more. And why not? We do it daily, all 7.125 billion of us on Earth. This may be one of the more significant impacts humans have on each other on the …
Trip Report – Palisades Traverse: June 15-18, 2016
Jimmy and Jack are some pretty cool cats, and they are down for adventure. Hailing from the east coast they have also fallen in love with the eastside of the Sierra with its blue skies and granite peaks. They have shared views of these peaks with their families and they have dreamed of the opportunity to climb them with a local, professional guide. I met Jimmy and Jack last summer during a crack climbing and self-rescue skills day we …
Eastern Sierra Backcountry Snow Report – May 14, 2016
Howdy Skiers and Snowboarders! I am starting to write this on Friday the 13th. Spoooooky. But weather and snowpack out there are producing some down home friendly riding conditions for those that are keeping the stoke of glisse alive into the heart of spring. Last installment of this report, we talked about the below average snow cover that exhibited consistently high snow quality. Since then that has remained the case. The spring thaw was delayed by a series of small, …
State of the High Sierra Backcountry – April 9th, 2016
Happy April backcountry skiers and snowboarders! What a season. It is hard to process it all, but suffice it to say that it has been the best in years. Sure, the El Niño turned into something of an el None yo, and that left a lingering air of disappointment that many just couldn’t get over. On the bright side, complaints about snow quantity were tempered by consistently high snow quality. There were very few days this season where the goods …
Eastern Sierra Ice Report – March 21, 2016 (End of Season)
Happy Spring Ice Climbers! Ice has been good this season, and we haven’t had many interesting ice happenings to report on until now. Spring is in the air and has recently sprung in force, so we are looking at the tail end of the ice climbing season around here. That said, we had some thick and fortuitous ice formations this winter that are holding on well at this point. As most climbers shift focus to the sunny rocky crags, the …
Eastern Sierra Backcountry Snow Report – March 12th, 2016
Skiers and Snowboarders! Happy late winter to you all. We took a brief hiatus from writing this report so that we could do some investigative journalism on the topic of why this winter has fallen so short of the epic proportions that were advertised. I sacrificed some well-earned personal Sierra ski time to instead make a journey into the heart of the Pacific, to the source of our Sierra weather, to see what the heck is going on. What I found …
Eastern Sierra Backcountry Snow Report – February 14th, 2016
Howdy backcountry sliding enthusiasts and Happy Valentine’s Day! Mark here, reporting on conditions in the Eastern Sierra. The last weekend of January essentially brought the region its first big El Niño storm. It was more of a classic El Niño dump – coming in wet with rain around 9000 feet and then exiting quite cold, with temps dropping to single digits a mere 48 hours after the arrival of the storm. The cold exiting of the storm brought snow down …