alaska, travel, photography, skiing, and what not
We had the great fortune to be camping the night of the “super-moon” in the City of Rocks, Idaho. The moon lived up to all the hype about how bright it was. We lucked out and had zero clouds in the sky all night. Here are some photos – believe it or not, these were all taken at night.
Here are some more photos from our flight last weekend in the Owyhee Mountains, Idaho. It is an amazingly remote area that sees little traffic compared to the rest of Idaho. What an amazing way to watch a sunrise as the earth awakens (we probably awoke some campers as we ripped by at 120 mph). Enjoy!
After springlike conditions early this weekend, a cold front moved through and we were skiing in little snow squalls all afternoon. Here are some shots as we made our way across the Camas Prairie. Cold, windy, muddy, and snowy.
Earlier this year I had a ski trip fall through and I ended up not taking a vacation day at work. The weather was fantastic – so good that I decided to go fly fishing on the Owyhee River instead of backcountry skiing for a mental health day. I went fishing with my dog (Moose, who is a Pudelpointer). He was pretty good, but would only stay on the bank for 15 minutes at a time. After that he came crashing into the water looking for whatever was swimming around. Overall a great day in the middle of winter and not a bad week because I got to backcountry ski, mountain bike and fly fish all within 6 days. Oh yeah, I worked a bit in the middle of all that!
Here are some of the photos I snapped on the river:
All within a week, I have been mountain biking, backcountry skiing, snowmobiling and fly fishing. Idaho is one of the only places I know of that you can do that. Here is a photo from Wednesday, fly fishing on the Owyhee River. Moose was doing his best to scare away the fish!
Moose doing his best to scare all the fish away.
After almost a year, the beast is out of the shop and ready to rock. I took the sled for a maintenance test ride on both Saturday and Sunday. While the storm was not really hitting Sun Valley with its full might, up near Dollarhide Summit there was about a foot of fresh snow and I was the first person to ride down the trail. I almost forgot how much fun it is to rip down a trail with 12 inches of fresh snow at 60 m.p.h.
The next day I went out Baker Creek on the last test drive and did a recon for some good backcountry skiing areas. I found some. I’ll be back later this year with skis and skins ready to schralp!
Here is the sled below Dollarhide:
All ready to load back up in the truck after the first ride:
After a very disappointing start to this ski season, Old Man Winter finally made up for himself and decided to bring solid winter conditions to Idaho. This past weekend I met some buddies up on Banner Summit outside of Stanley, ID. Last winter we all read a bunch about the great skiing right off Copper Mountain, so we decided to give it a whirl. I drove in from Ketchum and when I dropped into the Salmon River headwaters, the temperature dropped to -20° F and it made for a bitterly cold start to the day. I stopped to snap some photos on the way.
A car drove by as I was doing a 13 second exposure. Turned out kind of cool:
Once we got under way, we all warmed up and enjoyed the mid-winter Sun. It took about two hours to make it to the summit and then we looked for some places to ski. All of the southern aspects were pretty sun baked so we hit a western aspect tree run that was surprisingly good (tree run center-right on the photo below). About 12 inches of fresh snow on a supportable base. Here are some photos from the rest of the day.
Yesterday I was driving home and stopped to snap some photos on the Camas Prairie. It had been snowing for the past week and a cold front was moving in. As I made my way across the prairie, i was able to watch the blue sky and high winds displace the storm clouds that brought our mountains 3-5 feet of snow last week. Enjoy!
stoltz project 