I’m not sure that we could have picked a better day to be out in the mountains for a tour.  We had a gorgeous, sunny, bluebird day forcasted.  We opted to try and get into the backcountry for some high alpine skiing.

Crew for today included Brian Long (often referred to as BL, and our lone snowshoer), Darin Binion (our lone splitborder), Lindsay Brown (our resident pinhead), and my self (the only one on AT gear in the bunch).

Our destination for the day was a couloir down the face of Greg Mace Peak.  It turns out that the group I was with knew Amos Mace, the grandson of Greg Mace.  We walked the 5 miles from Ashcroft into the Mace hut and took a break for lunch.

After Lunch we thought about going up and skiing a run that Amos calls “the back yard”, but in the end decided that 400 hundred vertical of skiing wouldn’t quite be worth the 5 mile approach.  We opted to head up the road a bit further where we took a right on Pearl Pass road up towards the Tagart Hut.  We skinned by a couple groups headed back out and found ourselves breaking treeline with an amazing view of our surroundings.

We found ourselves at the base of the ridge throwing our prospective modes of transportation on our backs and begining the boot up the ridgeline.

The boot up was easy and fairly short to gain the false summit of Mace Peak. 

Our goal for this trip was the couloir that falls off of this sub peak, so we opted to drop in here rather than spend the additional time to head over to the rocky summit.  We walked down the slope a little ways to get out of the first real wind that we had experienced today. 

A quick snack, some de-skinning, and a little H2O and we are off. 

Lindsay:

Brian (BL):

Darin:

Yours Truly:

A look up at the line:

We skied back to the road and hightailed as far as our speed would take us.  The flat ski out was by far the longest part of the day, but we made it back in good time and were hanging out in the parking lot watching the sun fade away on another day in Colorado where all I keep thinking to myself is “man we live in a beautiful place.”

Thanks for reading

JW