Ben Eng 2016-10-20 04:57:09
BEYOND THE POWDER 500 IN THE SOUTHERN SAN JUANS
Telluride. It’s a remote and scenic former mining town, situated at the end of a deep box canyon in the northern part of the San Juan Mountains. A southwestern Colorado resort named after a mineral never actually found here. A town of 2,300 people that sits in a county that doesn’t have a single traffic light and voted 80 percent in favor of marijuana legalization in 2012, by far the highest margin in Colorado. It’s the location of Butch Cassidy’s first bank robbery and the first two AC power plants designed by Nikola Tesla for practical use. It’s also one of only a handful of places this side of Europe where the lifts and runs start and stop right in town. Plus, Oprah owns a house here. Indeed, it’s a town of contrasts, made up of the super-rich, backwoods rednecks and festivalgoing seasonal hippies, all tucked into a canyon at 8,750 feet.
When I first started riding in the early ’90s around Summit County, all I knew about Telluride was that Rocket Reaves grew up there. But for the younger, broker version of myself, it was a vague spot that was hard to access and expensive to visit. I finally got my first taste of the area when a coworker invited me on a road trip in ’96. At the time, I was looking for a four-year college transfer that was closer to a ski area than my hometown of Colorado Springs. Fort Lewis College in Durango fit the bill. It was a six-hour journey through the mountains to get there. I had never visited the southwest part of the state before, and was blown away by how much bigger, more rugged and beautiful the mountains were compared to Summit County and Vail. It was like being in a different part of the country. On that first trip, I watched a monoskier named Turbo cause a shitstorm when he bundled up a baby doll so you couldn’t tell if it was real and dropped it from the lift, years before the Landspeed/CKY video. (The dude is a freak, and if you really want to see something totally melt-your-face-off bizarre, look up The Rad, The Bad, and The Mono on YouTube.)
After settling into life in Durango, I was shredding Purgatory as often as possible between classes and work as it was only 30 minutes up the road. But once a season, I’d drive the two hours to Telluride. It wasn’t until 2003 that I got my break when my buddy Pete became the marketing director at Telluride. Pete was rad—he was stabbed in the head once in front of a bar in Durango, and he ran a campaign based on making fun of Telluride’s rich tourists and second-home owners. He knew I was getting started as a photographer, so he gave me a season’s pass. Coincidentally, my friend Pablo had moved to Telluride in 2003, and my first day riding with him opened my eyes to what the place really had to offer. Pablo and his roommate Herb took me straight to the backcountry access gates. I always knew the area itself was pretty solid—a huge vertical drop with no shortage of long, steep runs—but I had no idea what was lurking on the other side of the ropes. It was like taking nearby Silverton Mountain and attaching it to the side of an already great ski area, but with easier access, easier egress back to the lifts, touring access, and no rules and no avalanche control (a factor in Silverton’s favor). It was a real eye-opener— a functioning town with decent nightlife where you could walk to the lifts and hot lap the ski area, or take a lift-assisted tour to the some of the monolithic couloirs and faces the San Juans are known for, then ride park and après all you want because you haven’t seen your car in a month. By 2011, after spending years driving the constant loop between Wolf Creek, Purgatory, Silverton, and Telluride, I decided that dying in the morning highway madness also known as the Powder 500 wasn’t worth it and moved to Telluride full time.
Despite its abundant terrain and easy access, Telluride has never been at the forefront of snowboarding’s collective consciousness. It’s remote—the nearest cities of Denver and Albuquerque are six-hour drives in opposite directions. Unless you have a couch on which to crash and can afford the $120 lift tickets, it’ll drain your bank account. The often thin, sharky, unstable continental snowpack has scared away film crews with the exception of jump-building on nearby Red Mountain Pass. Only Rocket Reaves can claim true pro snowboard status as far as locals go, and his heyday was in the ’90s. Snowboarders are outnumbered by skiers 15-to-one and most shredders who make it to the northern San Juans find their way to Silverton, not even realizing that Telluride is two drainages away. But those who make it over here when it’s good are always blown away, especially people from other parts of Colorado who had no idea what was lurking in their backyard their whole lives. Like me, once.
But maybe the next generation will help put it on the snowboard map. Some of the kids that grow up here not only learn to ride park, but because of the backcountry accessibility, are also exposed to serious terrain early on. You’ll hear high schoolers in the lift line talking about getting in trouble for skipping school to ride one of the resort-accessible couloirs. Most of the time they’re introduced to the backcountry by the same crew of longtime locals that have been riding behind the ropes since the ’80s and ’90s. The result is a crop of all-terrain rippers with mountain skills and experience of riders 10 years their senior. Guys like 23-year-old Harry Kearney, a two-time Mt. Baker Legendary Banked Slalom winner—the youngest to ever take the Pro Men’s division—and his brother Hagen, a U.S. Boardercross team member. They’ve gone from park rats to making names for themselves as racers, but they’ve also climbed up and pointed it down more rocky couloirs at this point in their young lives than many of their peers ever will. Jerry Mark, another young local, just returned from a snowboard ascent/descent of Denali. Of the current crop of Telluride’s hungry high schoolers, Lucas Foster is probably the most self-motivated rider I’ve seen—he’s on top of filming and posting edits, is doing well in the USSA contest series, and even brought home the Duct Tape for his age division in the LBS this past winter (someone had to since Harry didn’t).
Most of them have spent plenty of time accessing the backcountry via the Bear Creek gate, off the east side of 12,000-foot-plus Gold Hill. When compared to our coastal brethren, Colorado’s typical snowpack requires a higher tolerance for risk if you want to get after it immediately following a storm. The growing number of people heading out the gates has reached the point at which waiting 24 hours for the new snow to heal means you’ll be riding bumps, which fuels the frenzy. It’s so damn good that you can’t blame people, but the traffic makes things sketchier. In the below-treeline zones known as the Lowers, the lack of visibility due to trees, cliffs and steep pitch means you’re probably dropping in on top of another group, and it won’t be long before another group is dropping in on top of you. The problem is not so bad in the alpine zones of the Uppers since groups can generally see each other from the safety zones and you usually get a day of settling before there’s enough visibility. The past few years I’ve cut back the amount I ride in the Lowers due to the human factor, and also because I’ve seen what going for a ride through the trees can do to a person—a few years back we lost our friend Nate Soules in those woods. That one hit home and made me reconsider some of my behavior, not only because I knew Nate, but also because it was my riding partner that day who tracked his beacon signal and dug him out. We had been separated due to miscommunication and he initially thought he was digging me out, which was pretty scary. I drew my lesson from it, and sometimes I get funny stares from friends in the lift line when they see me without my pack and beacon during a heavy storm, but I’m good with waiting a day or two.
Luckily, this winter we had one of the best cycles in years during December and January, without any of the disastrous warming between storms largely responsible for the ol’ San Juan shit sandwich of faceted layers. Lines went down that hadn’t been ridden in years. I accidentally navigated Harry Kearney by radio into the rocky choke halfway down a 1,000-foot-long, steep, narrow couloir called the Hairy Banana. He pulled off one of the more impressive straight lines I’d ever seen down the last half over a lot of shallow, unseen rock with little room for error. I had a reliable riding partner in Jerry Mark, who probably set the record for not wasting any good days and was always at the lift before it opened at 9 am. When a February warm spell hit, it didn’t matter because the park crew had built the best setup in years. When things picked up in March, we started skinning a little deeper and the snow held through May. Things were so good from the lifts this year I didn’t even care that the motor on my snowmobile seized. It was the best winter since 2007-2008 and hopefully we won’t have to wait another eight years for another one like it.
And that’s the thing about Telluride—sometimes it takes a little, or a lot, of patience. But that’s what’s kept me coming here for more than a decade, and will likely keep me here for a decade longer. When it’s good, it’s great.
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