JOE’S VALLEY, UT — Ice screws are your life link on frozen flows, and cold feet aren’t just a problem at the altar, so check out the ice climbing tips Stephen Koch is sharing this week. Whether you’ve been swinging tools for years, or are just getting started and looking to soak up some insider beta, Stephen has something for you. This week’s videos cover ice screws and keeping feet warm. Read More …
‘How To’ Articles
Ice Climbing with Backcountry.com Athlete Stephen Koch – PART 2
By: Sam Peters | January 14th, 2011JOE’S VALLEY, UT — The desert sky was a comforting light blue and the air frosty as Stephen Koch traveled to central Utah to review ice climbing techniques on a local flow. Climbing up frozen H2O can be intimidating to say the least, but with an experienced climbing buddy guiding you, the right gear aiding your ascent, and solid physical strength and an adventurous spirit propelling you through the most challenging moves, it can be a rush and one hell of a workout.
So kick back and spend a few minutes watching Stephen Koch’s ice climbing tips. Whether you’ve been swinging tools for years or are just getting started and looking to soak up some insider beta, Stephen has something for you. This week’s videos cover basic crampon and ice axe techniques. Read More …
100 Days, 100 Ways: Tips for Hitting the Century Mark
By: TJ Parsons | January 12th, 2011
Grab a friend and get after it
Racking up over 100 days in one season is a feat that many snow addicts fantasize about but few ever actually accomplish. It’s one thing to take a resort job for eight bucks an hour, live in a roach-infested ski-town apartment with six roommates, and ride every day. … But when your life includes stuff like loan payments and a “real job,” putting together a triple-digit season gets a lot tougher. But that’s not to say it can’t be done; follow these handy tips to better your odds of reaching the ultimate snow-bum benchmark.
Ice Climbing with Backcountry.com Athlete Stephen Koch
By: Sam Peters | January 7th, 2011For the next month, we’ll be sharing some of Backcountry.com athlete Stephen Koch‘s ice climbing tips and techniques with readers. Whether you’ve been swinging tools for years or are just getting started and are looking to soak up some insider beta, Stephen has something for you.
Tip #1: What’s in Your Pack
Stephen Koch takes you through what to pack for a day of climbing routes at your local zone.
Winter Training: Dial Your Layers
By: Beth Lopez | January 5th, 2011
Backcountry athlete Karl Meltzer (photo by Tommy Chandler/Backcountry.com)
In the warmer months, aerobic conditioning is just so easy. You can get as high-end as you like with your training clothing and shoes, but when it comes down to it, you can be reasonably comfortable running or hiking in any well-fitted trail runners, shorts, and a light shirt. In the winter, however, aerobic endorphin addicts (possibly including this article’s author) have a harder time staying comfortable while hiking, running, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing. You either layer minimally and freeze your muscles, or you overdo the layering, then sweat and suffer the dreaded clammy-freeze as soon as the breeze picks up. Your attention span can only weather so many Cheers re-runs as you crank away on the Stairmaster at the gym, and you’d definitely prefer to be outdoors. What’s a winter workout junkie to do? We dug deep and found some answers.
How to Drive (and Not to Drive) to the Ski Area During a Snowstorm
By: Kate Showalter | December 9th, 2010
Driving 23 miles took us more than three hours.
Around 8 p.m. on a recent Friday night, CalTrans announced that, beginning 20 miles west of the top of Donner Pass, Calif., all vehicles needed traction tires and either chains or four-wheel/all-wheel drive. We were just three exits from the chain-up checkpoint when we drove into mayhem. Semis were lined up in the pullouts, and their drivers were chaining up. Installers dressed in bright yellow rain gear were, for a fee, helping car drivers get their chains on. Getting to the checkpoint took us an hour.
At the chain-up checkpoint, we exited the highway, and my husband put chains on our car’s front tires, and then he drove a few hundred yards and hopped back out to double-check that the chains were secure (an important step if you don’t want to leave your chains on the highway). Then a CalTrans worker waved us back onto the freeway. We didn’t get far before we were at a standstill again.
Yes, conditions were bad—an early season storm started as rain and turned to snow … and lots of it—but I’m certain we could have all moved through smoothly albeit slowly if drivers didn’t make so many boner moves. Read More …
Pause, Don’t Stop: Quick Skin Stripping
By: Adam Riser | November 23rd, 2010
Backcountry.com fraud manager Jamon Whitehead stripping his skin during a pre-work tour.
You met up at 6:00 in the morning and have been skinning for two hours. Now you’re on the ridge and ready to drop in. Well, almost. You unclip your bindings, take off your skis, and sink into your waist in the two feet of freshies that fell last night. Then you peel your skins one at a time, but you get snow stuck to the bottom since you’re waist deep in it (good luck putting those back on for lap two). Looking around at your friends, you realize that they’re already ready and not-so-patiently waiting for you to finish your yard sale. You still need to stomp out a platform and crawl back to the surface, buckle your boots, stash your skins, and put your skis back on. After that, you better ski your ass off to make sure you get invited back tomorrow.
How did your friends go through all those steps so quickly? They didn’t. They stripped their skins and adjusted their boots without ever taking off their skis. Put a little practice into this simple trick and you won’t be the one that everyone else is waiting for.
Get Your Skis Ready for the Season
By: staff | November 19th, 2010Last month we received a message in our inbox:
I’m hoping you’re going to do something like this and I’d be surprised if it didn’t come up before hand. This is the first year I’ll actually have a pair of nice skis that I want to get ready for the ski season and I was wondering if you’d have tips on what to do to “get them ready.”
- Adam
Apparently someone actually clicked the Contact Us link at the bottom of the sidebar. Usually we only get messages from SEO spammers and appendage-enhancing-pill-pushers. It was refreshing to get something from a reader.
So we thought we’d help Adam out. Read More …
Oh Crap, You Dropped Your Belay Device
By: Adam Riser | October 12th, 2010
Jesse Mattner 1,000 feet up Mt. Moran with 3,500 feet left to go ... a terrible place to drop a belay device
At the top of pitch seven, you build an anchor and clip in. You call, “Off belay,” pull up the rest of the rope, unclip your belay device from the back of your harness, and fumble it. That very important piece of aluminum falls cleanly to the ground without touching a thing along the way, but you’re still seven pitches up with several more to go. You can continue to the top or rap to the ground, but you just dropped the one piece of gear that allows you to do either. You’re not completely SOL though. With a few old-school tricks you can carry on like nothing ever happened. Read More …
Get Ripped for Riding
By: Toni Isom | October 4th, 2010You bust ass in the winter—skinning up, building booters, riding from first till last chair. But when summer rolls around, all that discipline goes down the drain. Even if you spend all summer mountain biking or trail running, beer, BBQs, and more beer generally destroy your mid-winter strength.
Want to get in shape for the upcoming season, but don’t want to waste time lifting weights? Here are some workouts that will get you ripped, but won’t kill your buzz. Read More …
Zen and the Art of Managing Powder Panic
By: JGW | December 30th, 20104 Comments »
Every region of the skiing world has its own particular form of this terrible ailment or morning malaise … a rapacious brooding that turns happy citizens into gorilla-chest-pounding, car-horn-honking, Ben-Hur-on-the-traverse fiends. This sanctimonious demon’s name: powder-induced panic. Let me elucidate a specific example …
Salt Lake City’s proximity to habit-forming ski terrain is, like almost anything during this merry-go-round around the Sun, both a boon and bane. Yes, friends, just like Peter Parker’s uncle once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” If you haven’t experienced how empowering 24 inches of Wasatch-density awesomeness can be, then maybe it’s time you took a trip.
But let’s not forget what Lord Acton said: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Salt Lake is within short driving distance of more than ten ski and riding resorts—and the greater-Wasatch-front sprawl boasts more than 2 million citizens. Consider the cumulated monster cloud of psychic anxiety that collects over this salty front each morning fresh snow has fallen … it’s like Ray’s incarnation of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to the Nth degree. Seriously, people WILL lose their shit.
Allow me to offer some suggestions to help you harness this power (and be responsible) without letting it overcome you: Read More …
Tags: resorts, skiing, snowboarding
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