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Earning Your Turns | Alpine Touring 101 (a.k.a Ski Touring)

Alpine touring is, in a nutshell, a terrible way to spend an hour or four. Instead of using the ski lift to reach the top of a mountain, like a sane person, you choose to hike up to the top of the mountain with your skis and boots still strapped to you feet. Which is where the phrase, “earning your turns” comes from. It takes exponentially longer than taking a lift, and you can ski significantly few runs per day.  But for some people, earning your turns, is the only way they will ski.  How exactly are you supposed to …

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A Proper Epic: A Wild Ski Touring Story Experience

Epic (/ˈepik/): When a proposed plan goes to sh!t and you find yourself off route; taking place usually in the dark. This past Tuesday night, my buddy Pete and I decided to check out a new zone to ski tour. The plan was to ski Mount Aire in Lambs Canyon. The peak is visible every time you drive East on 80 going from Park City to Salt Lake, and for that reason, I wanted to ski it! So we met up in the parking lot, just off the exit and went over our “plan.” I had no beta about his …

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Backcountry Skiing

The silence, the solitude, the vertical gain, and of course… the deep powder. When it comes to skiing, spending a day touring around in the mountains is hard to beat. For something as simple as sliding down a field of snow, backcountry skiing is tremendously complex, physically exhausting, and gear intensive. For those three reasons I can’t get enough of it. Every ski tour starts at the beginning of the season with the state of the snowpack. Understanding how the season’s snowfall layers up and where the weak layers exist . The morning of a tour, you wake up and …

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Becoming A Local | 50+ Days Skiing This Season Part 2

After receiving a great amount of feedback from my last post (50+ Days of Skiing), and a great suggestion from my buddy Bill, I decided to write part 2. Whenever I’ve been to a place on a trip or for vacation, I’ve always noticed one thing that stood out to me in particular. It wasn’t just the mountains. It wasn’t the cool small towns. The thing that stood out to me the most were the locals. Whenever I’d strike up a conversation with someone on a chair lift, and they’d mention that they were “from there”, I used to get …

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50+ Days Skiing This Season

It’s been my goal, or dream if you will, to ski for 30 days in a single ski season. That means clicking into your skis for one month out of the year between the first snowfall of October, until the last snow melts in April. After picking up skiing in 2015, I fell in love with it immediately and tried to ski as much as possible. But while I lived in New England, I never even got close to more than 15 days in a season. Fortunately, that all changed when I moved up to Park City for the 18-19 …

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