dizzy
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Posts posted by dizzy
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Arcteryx Gamma on SAC now
get em if you want it b4 they're gone
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K2 has released the 07-08 models for snowboards and skis. they looked sick this afternoon, but now the website seems to be down.
burton will relaunch their website on thursday
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kumapix, u better get moving on it. a magazine like that will already have their layout design well in process by now
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here's FT ragging on the south face of Happo in April. one of my favorite pics i took last season
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you missed it ian.
unless you wanna pedal on concrete around the island, it's not gonna be fun.
we asked a cab driver and two locals, got the same answer.
as soon as you head inward on the island, the terrain gets mad. can't imagine even the most extreme MTBer traversing the island.
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Originally Posted By: AK 77Dizzely... no ski. any plans to get some steezin new gear or going to continue incurring the style wrath of Kuma and FT! ha ha.
i refuse to broach that subject online in fear of kumapix putting up more naked tennis porn pictures of himself
yes will buy a sh#tload of gear come september
Summer homework:
Kamikochi, summit Yari
Hodaka, cause it looks cool
Happo to Goryu, have a look at the Takeda Diamond, maybe through to Ogisawa
Nikko, again
if i get to half of these mts. before nov i'll be happy -
there was some cool terrain on Yakushima. and of course trees were everywhere and awesome in size and stature
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kumapix, did u 5 hiking this weekend?
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danm, now no one is going to see my picture on the bottom of page 24!!
this is ugly:
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NPM thx 4 asking, got lucky w/ 3 days of sunshine.
5.2-5.6.2007
taxi from 0 to 1100m. hiked up to 1934 and back down to 0. camped on the beach and then it rained. went to a museum on the last day in Kagoshima.
not much time right now, i'll let the pics do the talkin:
we spent 1.5 days getting to the summit,
to find an obasan who had tripped and hit her head on a rock. huge gash on her head. poor lady.
helicopter came just as we arrived on the summit. dust/pebbles from the chopper blades got in my camera. this was the last shot before my camera broke.
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OK, let's get back to pics:
FT getting his on the Happo South face, april 8. Kuma and Sugi on that day.
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no i won't be going up this weekend. off to sendai for work
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>"Hokkaido's mountains are 2000 meter class"
Niseko An’nupuri
1308-m
Rutsusu 944m
>"The Colorado rockies are over 13 000 ft. (I’m sure half of you know this shit so I’m sorry to state the obvious.) ...No glaciers to speak of in Colorado."
I used to live in Colorado. There are glaciers in the colorado rockies
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Originally, I’d meant to go to Anchorage and my brother who lives in Dutch (that’s Dutch Harbor, a town on the Aleutian Island of Unalaska) was going to join me for four days of snowboarding. But his wife was 8 1/2 months pregnant with their third kid, so I ended up going solo.
This was my second trip, the first being to Dutch in 2004. Fractured wrist at the time, no skiing.
Alaska is BIG:
I had a “weekend Heli package” reserved at Chugach Powder Guides and they came to Ted Steven’s Airport in Anchorage to pick me up. It’s a 40-minute drive into the town of Girdwood with scenery like this:
And super couloirs like this across the Turnagain Arm:
CPG’s weekend package is two days lift tickets at Alyeska Ski Resort and two days reserved in the bird, flying weather permitting, with accommodations at the plush Alyeska Hotel. I wanted an extra day in the chopper, so I ditched the second resort day and reserved a seat. With three chopper days reserved, I hoped I’d be lucky to get one day of good weather.
Whenever you go to Alaska, it’s hit and miss. It’s like playing the lottery for the chance to ski dream lines that are two-three times as long as lines the Hakuba crew has been ripping. I can’t comment on Alaska powder, it was April! Powder season’s over mid-March in AK.
The driver was a cool dude and gave me pointers on where to go in Girdwood.
Day one was the resort day:
The tram takes you up the north face of Mt. Alyeska from 2,500 feet from 250 above sea level and then you get views like this all day:
I was only at the resort one day, so I prolly don’t have a well-rounded opinion of it, but I didn’t like it. At this time of year, it’s bright until 11:00 p.m and it takes that much longer for the snow to soften up. The resort is kind of like A-basin in Colorado—a handful of groomed “trails” but you can go anywhere you want. The snow didn’t soften up and after a few hours on crunchy chunky edge-destroying chop, I called it a day.
The next day was much better and I’m glad I reserved the extra day.
The best way to go to CPG for big mountain skiing is with a crew of three of your buddies. That way, you don’t get a group of varied ability. I was lucky enough to be with a skier and a telemarker who could hold their own. There was another skier, too. Four clients per bird.
The guides build you up run by run. On the first run, they took us close to a Bergschund to show us what one was and how fricking big they actually are.
“No turns over this!” the guide shouted. I pointed my board over 10 meter long, two meter wide hole that was partially covered, partially exposed. And this was a small one. We tried different slopes. South and east were crap, and west-facing slopes let off enough slough to knock you on your ass. After trying a north and north-west facing slopes, we found gold: stable and smooth powder. We hit north-facing slopes the rest of the day.
We were all too busy skiing for a lot of pics, but here’s one of the bird taking another group of clients up for another run. The big mountain in the background is the west face of Alyeska Resort. Turnagain behind it.
CPG guarantees you 11,000-20,000 vertical feet skied. The Winter Creek Glacier
of the Chugach Mountains are their backyard, so they have pre-determined terrain and know how much vertical in on each. And runs have all got names.
We skied slopes where you can’t see your first two or three turns, runs with names like Grasshopper, Gold Pan, and Check it Out. The runs were more intense than anything I’ve ever ridden or skied before, my best is prolly Mott Canyon at Heavenly in Tahoe or some chutes FT has taken me to in Hakuba.
The weather was great; it was warm, 5 C, and a slight breeze. We rebated Grasshopper twice and the third time, the pilot landed on a tiny spine of a ridge about as wide as your desk with the end of the blades three feet from a band of rocks. “Real slow,” he ordered us as we got out. The snow was soft, knee-to-mid-hip deep, smooth. Heaven is another word that describes it.
We took lunch under blue skies. CPG brings lunch up. Chicken wraps, soup, and at 4,000 feet is pretty good. Two other guides came up to skin one couloir of about a billion up there and check the snowpack.
We kept hitting runs until 6:30 (it was still bright as early afternoon for us mid-latitude dwellers). Eight hours, nine runs and 25,900 vertical feet, we’d just come down a north-facing run, called Hendrix. It was now cloudy and the guide was ready to call it a day. We were waiting for our helicopter and the clouds broke. I said to the guide, “Hey, Jon, can we go to that couloir the other guides re-conned?”
He said sure.
It was highlight of the day and the trip. Hendrix Couloir. 900 vertical meters, 40-45 degrees, beautiful. This was my first real couloir. I think I’m in love:
Guide, client about 30 meters below; tracks of the guides who re-conned it and the bird in the plain below:
The tail guide on the top third, the tiny speck there:
But there’s no perspective for scale:
There’s tons of terrain there and people do much more gnarly slopes than this. But, from what the guides and staff were saying, that was their run of the season, so consider myself pretty damn lucky. I’m definitely going back to Alaska.
Will add snowcat pictures up of the last two days of powder later. It snowed the next 5 days. Thanks samurai and fubuki for the advice on AK.
Last week, my brother’s wife gave birth to a daughter, their first. If he doesn’t have another kid next time I go to AK, he’ll hopefully be joining me.
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ran EKIDEN sunday w/ friends from work. EKIDEN is a relay race with 4 people 10km, 5km, 3km, 5km. other ekidens have different lengths.
my leg was 3kms in about 16 min. now i have shin-splints, feels good.
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EBC how was tateyama? did u 5?
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would it be possible, in the near or far future, to get Preferences on the photo galler?
90% of my pics are the same setting:
specific folder (bakkan)
Prefecture: Nagano
Resort: Happo or Tsugaike
It would be great to have such preferences saved every time I go to upload photos.
Great to hear the increase to 500kb! Awesome
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fifty-twelve billion people ski that valley on the left, raicho, during GW, serreche. it's a typical tats line
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yes, very useful where it is now. thx!
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my line sunday:
my line monday, may 1st. not a bad way to start the month
kuma, if you have pics of me chickening out on the spring slough, please put em up or send them to me thx
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and jer sipping some after killing it.
that's the Karamatsu saddle behind us (2411m on the topos), one of the lowest points on the Hakuba Ridge from Tsugaike to Karamatsu:
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kuma gettin' his:
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here's our canvas, Saturday:
and how we painted it, taken from basically the same spot the next day :
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was sugi able to use my duck hunters all right, kuma?
Banff Mountain Film Festival in Japan 2007
in Snow talk, trip reports, Japan avalanche & backcountry
Posted
Awesome!!
Last year, Patagonia told me the "schedule didn't work out," so there Banff FF didn't come to Japan.
I went the year before and it was great.
Stoked to hear it's back. Thx for the post slow!