30 years and three good friends

My good friends Grant Helgeson and Ryan Strong agreed to join me for a long ski tour to celebrate my 30th birthday. We wanted three things from the tour: Ski all day, ski something new, stand on top of something. The original plan (created with complete lack of knowledge about the area) was to ski up White Pine and get to the summit of Red Top (aka, west American Fork Twin), ski the west face, summit Red Baldy, ski the northwest face, get up White Baldy, ski off it and head back to the
car. Unfortunately, we got a slightly late start because some jackass (me) forgot his boots in his truck and the whole crew had to drive back to the base of Big Cottonwood to retrieve them. As we pulled into the cirque we were awarded with an amazing view of all three objectives, a nearly bluebird sky, and the sound of the Wasatch Powder Guides helicopter buzzing our heads while dropping clients at the top of everything we hoped to ski. If you've ever skinned for four hours only to have a chopper land 100 feet in front of you and drop off a full load of clients who proceed to tear up the untracked face that you were planning to ski then you can understand our frustration. This day definitely put me solidly in the Heli Free Wasatch group. None of us had ever been up White Pine, and we found essentially no information on routes up any of these peaks, so we had to make things up as we went. We ended up taking a relatively hard route up Red Top that involved lots of very steep, rocky skinning and eventually required boot packing. A small storm had moved in by the time we reached the top, and we realized that this meant the end of our original goal since it required quite a bit of pretty tough route finding and that our view from the first summit was supposed to answer many of the questions. We chilled on top for a while and ate lunch in hopes of clearing skies, but it wasn't to be. We couldn't just ski down the west face and hope everything went OK, because we had absolutely no idea what was down there. Instead, we did the lamest thing we could think of and reversed our bootpack until the snow was deep enough to actually ski. The sun finally came out as we peeled our skins, and we skied down the northwest ridge which gave us a long (if mellow) run of classic snow. By now the sun had finally come out and proceeded to turn everything into quick-dry concrete. We kicked off the occasional wet slide, but nothing too serious. Skiing the northwest ridge instead of the west face put us way out of position to hit another peak, and since the sun was baking everything into absolute mank, we decided to head west and get into the north-facing trees in hopes that the shady aspect and tree cover would lead to better snow. Our decision proved to be the right one, and we spent the rest of the afternoon skiing beautiful fluffy powder in the shade before heading to the car as the sun set. It wasn't quite the alpine skiing trifecta that we had wanted, but any day in the mountains is better than a good day on the couch.

The 30th year of my life has proven to be one of the best. I ski and bike better than I ever have, I climbed my hardest rock routes this fall, and I got to go to a place deep in the Northwest Territories that few people get to see but many dream of. Most importantly, I have tons of good friends to share all these experiences with. Thanks to Grant and Ryan for coming with me today, and a huge shout-out to all those friends who've helped me out when I needed it, pushed me when I've needed it, spent good and bad days with me in the mountains, and generally made my life a great one to live.