Outdoors

There’s nothing wrong with parachuting into an area, skiing a renowned peak, and then heading home, but that’s not why Kim Havell came to Wyoming. No, she moved to Jackson a year ago specifically to immerse herself in the steep wild playground that is the Tetons, and the list of her descents after just one season in the range is impressive. It includes the Grand, Middle, and South Tetons, village classic Once is Enough, and dozens more. All of which is context for what she did last week: become the first woman to ski the Otter Body route on the Grand. It was her third attempt. The first was shut down because snowboarder Jeremy Jones was doing the route and it wouldn’t have been cool to tackle it, too. The second was skunked by unexpected weather. But the third try was perfect: a night spent at 11,000 feet led to a 3 a.m. start up the Ford-Stettner route, followed by first turns at 9 a.m. The Otter Body was first skied by Doug Coombs and Mark Newcomb in June 1996. Coombs had been eyeing it for about five years — Jackson local, Steve Shea, told him, “In the perfect year, at the perfect time, during the perfect hour, skiing the Otter Body is possible. It’s the most aesthetic, direct ski route off the Grand Teton.” Since then, the Otter Body has seen numerous tracks, but it’s nevertheless a burly, exposed route. When Havel, Brian Warren, and Pete Gaston first dropped onto the East Face, the snow was still a bit firm, though the forecast was for considerable warming. They waited 15 minutes to let it soften, then skied perfect corn on a slope in excess of 50 degrees to the first rappel. In that short span, the mercury was already climbing, ice was melting, and rocks were starting to fall, so they didn’t waste time scooting through the rap and to the Otter Body. Other than a few dodgy anchors and some extremely wet rappels in waterfall conditions, it all went smoothly. Compared to the more common Ford-Stettner route,in the Otter Body “you’re a lot more exposed,” Havell says. “You’re committed 100 percent. I don’t think you feel the exposure in Ford-Stettner as much. There are pullouts, areas of safety. But once you commit to the Otter Body, you’re committed to the dance. There’s no place to hide or change your mind.” Being the first woman to ski the Otter Body “was sort of a bonus. First females are tough. I definitely take credit for them because they’re part of our careers in the sport. They bring up the level in the sport, and you try to be on as even ground as you can. But it’s not the reason why I do things.”

Last year, I bought a house.  Certainly not the nicest house, as it needed quite a bit of work.  It’s on a busy street and it was pretty exposed to a high volume of traffic. So I built a privacy fence.  It was about 75 feet long, with one gate, all wood.  It took me less than a day to dig the posts, build the fence, and stain it.  I had a bit of help from my friends and family, but it was a pretty quick, easy project. My friend asked me to help him with his.  He wanted to build a fence that bordered his entire lot, around 300 feet, with 6 gates due to easement access issues.  I figured it wouldn’t take more than a few days, especially with two people, and he had a bobcat with an auger, rather than the hand auger from the rental shop.  The first day, we got about 30 feet in, and he ran out of materials.  The next day, we got about 20 more in before something came up and we had to stop.  The next, we got the posts in for about 90 ft of fence in the back yard, but still needed to dig and set the posts for both sides of the house.  Since this was taking much longer than anticipated, mostly because my friend refuses to buy more than a few hours worth of materials, I had to go back to work.  He claims that if he bought everything at once, I’d work through the night to get it done, and he doesn’t like to work that long at once, understandably.  Luckily, he rounded up another friend to help with the fence for a while.  When I came back to help, he’d finally gotten a palate of cedar for the slats.  I put as many up as I could, until we ran out.  Because he bought the last of the cedar, we had to wait a few more days until more cedar came in.  I had to go back to work.  After a few weeks of this, we still have to rip a few slats for the ends of the fence, where the space is an inch or two smaller than the slap, and we have to stain it.  Not sure if either of these things will ever be done, but it’s good enough to keep the dogs in. Now onto another project.

Nothing I can possibly write would be better than what “Transmorphers” director Scott Wheeler and “Malibu Shark Attack” writer Keith Shaw say about their new movie, Avalanche Sharks. After a horrific avalanche, the staff at Twin Pines Ski Resort starts to receive reports of missing people and creatures that move beneath the snow. As the body count piles up, the management tries to cover up the situation, which leads to disaster on their busiest day of the year: Bikini Snow Day. Spring break in the mountains: snowboarding, beer, drunken co-eds in bikinis. As the yearly Bikini Ski Day party descends on a small mountain town, something lurks beneath the snow. When an unwitting rider causes an avalanche, it awakens a huge, menacing, pre-historic Snow Shark! With a newfound taste for human flesh, the Snow Shark picks off the snow bunnies mercilessly. Cut off from help by mountainous terrain and blinding snow, the local sheriff must make an unlikely alliance with a motley crew of snowboarders to take down the Snow Shark before the white hills run red with blood! Not since Frozen have I been so excited about a snow movie. The only way it could be better is it was starring the platinum blonde daughter of Hulk Hogan as the improbable Dr. Sandy Powers, scientist. Oh wait, it is.

Starting in 2005 as a group of crowd-sourced rock climbing beta websites, MountainProject.com has grown to more than two million users and become a go-to resource for climbing route info across the U.S. and the world. Now, the producers of Mountain Project have announced a comprehensive user-driven website for mountain biking info at MTBProject.com. MTB Project’s new platform combines trail descriptions, photos, maps, condition reports, and data, all downloadable to iPhones and Androids. Several hundred trails have been posted across the country so far on the beta site, most strongly centered in Colorado and Utah. The full site will go online in early summer 2013. Adventure Projects co-founder Nick Wilder says the idea was born out of searching for mountain bike trail beta around the internet and finding a few resources but nothing that was quite perfect. “We kept thinking, ‘It sure would be nice to have a Mountain Project for biking…’” Wilder says. “And so after being unimpressed with the other options, we decided it was worth building.” He and co-founders Katy Ryan and Mike Ahnemann started dreaming up a user-based mountain bike web site, and connected with the 35,000-member International Mountain Bicycling Association at the perfect time. “We happened to start talking to IMBA just as they were preparing to start a massive campaign to map every trail in the country,” Wilder says. Combining that with our technical expertise and experience with large-scale, user-generated content was an immediate no-brainer for all of us.” Wilder says eight years of watching Mountain Project grow taught him a few lessons about curating content. Unlike Mountain Project, MTB Project content will not be completely user-edited: Three editors will review every trail for content thoroughness, grammar, and trail legality and accuracy. MTB Project collects GPS coordinates for everything — trails, trail photos, parking lots, technical features, for mapping and virtual 3D rides. As more data is collected, MTB Project will suggest trails to users based on their ratings of trails they’ve ridden. The iPhone app is available and the Android app is coming soon, and both have the ability to download entire trail networks for offline use, which show users their position on the trail by using their smartphone’s GPS. The website is free, and so are the apps, and although the website will be funded by ads, Wilder says future plans may include a paid app. Wilder says Mountain Project’s registered users grew about 30 percent per year since 2005, and although the population of mountain bikers is higher than that of climbers, the need for data is smaller — there are fewer trails than there are routes. In that way, mapping rides should theoretically be a little easier, but MTB Project will also tackle more ambitious ideas — like mapping the entire mountain bike route for the Colorado Trail (LINK). “Climbing and biking move people very deeply and create some of the most positive experiences in life,” Wilder says. “Sharing them with others is rewarding — tens of thousands of people have done it on Mountain Project, and we hope the same will happen with mountain biking.” For more, visit mtbproject.com

Blazing heat…beads of sweat rolling down my face…sounds of birds chirping as I paddle toward some trash in the water right in front of me a alligator swims off. My name is Gabriel Gray and that was a small bit of what I do in the sport of SUP. I was born and raised on a farm in North Florida. I spent most of my childhood exploring the local rivers and lakes in the area. My teenage years were influenced by the Wassica River and the Gulf of Mexico; fishing, hunting, tracking, surfing and rodeo were the norm when not helping on the farm. I developed a passion and respect for Mother Nature and the Ocean at an early age, learning to survive of the land around me. This added to my success as a big game tracker in the Sierra Nevada’s. After riding bulls professionally for a while I decided it was time to move home and rediscover my roots. Completing college I became a Firefighter/EMT and USLA open water lifeguard and moved to Panama City Beach Florida. I added the sport of Stand up Paddleboarding as one of my passions in life shortly after and became a WPA Level 2 instructor. Later my wife and I started a local Paddleboard company, Walkin’ On Water Paddleboards providing ECO-tours and lessons. In 2012 I became a team member of Mother Ocean.org offering my skills in mapping and logistics for the expedition paddles we do. We have completed over 400 river and ocean miles and becoming the first paddleboarders to conquer multiple rivers like the Apalachicola and Kissimmee Rivers. I am proud to be a part of the MK family and can’t wait to share stories from our trips, gear reviews and introduce people to the exploration side of SUP!

Big mountain skier Chris Davenport, whose career has taken him to the summits of Everest and Denali and steep slopes on the Antarctic Peninsula, has launched a new project to keep the stoke in his backyard: climbing and skiing Colorado’s highest 100 peaks. Davenport brainstormed the Centennial Skiers project with friends Ted and Christy Mahon, fellow Aspenites who have also climbed and skied all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains — as Davenport famously did over the course of 12 months in 2006 and 2007. Ted Mahon completed the 14ers in 2008, and Christy Mahon became the first woman (and the eighth person overall) to ski all the 14ers in 2010. Davenport and the Mahons are charging hard over the spring months to finish the top 100 and documenting their progress on CentennialSkiers.com. The trio have no set timeline and just hope to “ski them all safely and by cool and challenging lines,” Davenport says. All three started the project with a few peaks checked off, and out of a total list of 47 have about 35 remaining as of May 12. Technicalities regarding what peaks “count” as true “14ers” mean there are only 53 14ers on the “official” Centennial List, so the list the Mahons and Davenport are using includes 47 total peaks, all higher than 13,800 feet. Davenport started his Ski the 14ers project in 2006 with some beta — legendary Aspen ski mountaineer Lou Dawson had skied all the peaks over a period of 13 years in the 1980s and ’90s, paving the way. Although no one’s compiled ski info on lots of the peaks, Davenport says the logistics of this project make it seem easier than the 14ers. “With all of the information that is available on the internet these days, and with Google Earth and great maps like MyTopo.com, it’s actually easier than ever to climb and ski peaks and have a good baseline of knowledge about them when doing so,” Davenport says. “Plus I personally am so much more experienced with going fast in the high Colorado mountains than I was seven years ago that mountains that once seemed like a big day now might be a half day or even part of a link-up. It’s funny how your perspective on things changes as you push your personal bar higher and higher.” Ted Mahon wrote in April on the Mahons’ blog, Stuck In The Rockies, that the three assume the project will take longer than one season and that they’ll try to ski together whenever possible and plan to finish the list as a group. Davenport checked off 15 summits in a 19-day period in May, some with the Mahons, some without. Besides skiing a bunch of rad backcountry lines, Davenport hope the project will help build buzz and interest in ski mountaineering, in Colorado and the U.S., as his Ski the 14ers did six years ago. “After my 14ers project, there has been a huge boom in ski mountaineering on those peaks, so my hope is that the same thing will happen here, and people will continue to safely explore mountains that really never got skied much before,” he says.

All photos, unless otherwise noted-Skier: Jillian Raymond, Photos: State of the Backcountry Gear Review by Jillian Raymond- This year was my first year skiing on Praxis Skis, and it won’t be my last. Watching local “dudes” rip around on Praxis skis for the past few years in Tahoe created a major “FOMO” for a more Related posts: Praxis Freeride Skis | Gear Review The Black Diamond Carbon Megawatt Skis | Gear Review Spring Skiing in the High Sierra | Tioga Pass Conditions Report

This was the 25th annual Grizzly Triathlon.  Somehow, the weather in April, in Montana is cold, rainy and cloudy, but on Grizzly Triathlon day, it’s sunny and beautiful.  This year, the forecast was abysmal, snow, rain, wind.  It threatened to rain several times in the morning, but it held off.  As always, the sun ended up coming out, but it was unusually windy.  Claims of 40 mile and hour gusts blew straight down the canyon where the bike portion took place.  This made for a screaming fast ride out, and a brutal struggle back. This is the first year in 10 years I did not race.  After the Great Divide mountain bike attempt, I was left with a numb hand and numb feet for 4 months, and a somewhat numb motivation to train.  Skiing this winter helped quite a bit, since it was a good break from the same routine of swimming, biking and running, but I just can’t seem to get into the pool.  I love swimming in open water, and got a chance to train in Hawaii this winter, where the water is warm enough, one doesn’t need a wetsuit.  Until the river warms up enough to be tolerable to swim with a wetsuit, I’m focusing more on riding and running, and didn’t feel prepared enough to jump into a pool swim triathlon.  I will wait until later in the year, and find open water races. This just means that this is the first time I’ve ever watched the Grizzly Triathlon. After racing triathlons and never watching them, I found that they are more boring that I thought.  But maybe I’m jaded because I have been lucky enough to compete in them, which is way more exciting than watching.  The transition area was the most exciting thing to watch, where racers jumped out of the water and onto their bikes, then off their bikes and onto the run.  I saw just how important practicing ones transitions is.  The potential winner hopped on his bike, looked down to put his foot in his shoe, swerved into an oncoming biker, and crashed.  He quickly got up, put his shoes on, then started off again, costing him about 20 seconds.  Sure enough, at the end of the race, he finished about 20 seconds behind the 1st place racer. It would have been a great finish if it wouldn’t have lost those 20 seconds. I was honored to be able to hand out Mountain Khakis Gift cards to the overall and age group winners.  The racers were very excited about such a nice prize.  Attached are two photos of the MK banner at the transition zone, with the canyon that the racers run and ride down in the background.

Baffin Island: A Skier’s Journey EP2 [Season 2] from Jordan Manley Photography on Vimeo.

A new comer to the world of Mountain Khaki, Team Tangent gets the knob to represent MK in one of the east coasts most prestigious regattas – Charleston Race Week. Coming off their win in Key West just a few months ago, the team was ready for the level of competition Charleston has always produced. Starting the weekend of racing with a few hours of practice on Thursday afternoon to shack down any would be hazards. The team felt confident in their ability to produce good results for owner Gerry Taylor. With expected weather conditions a little outside the range of “ideal racing conditions” for most boats. Tangent, a Cape Fear 38 felt right at home with the building breeze and lumpy seas. The next three days of racing proved to be a great showing for our new friends at Mountain Khaki. Team Tangent not only secured the class win, but placed first in each race throughout the regatta thus developing the highly coveted “Picket Fence”. Thank you Charleston Race Week officials and Race Committee members, because of your efforts Charleston Race Week continues to produce some the best racing any sailor would dream of. When it came time for awards, each member of the team sported a MK Soul Patch Cap, MK Granite Creek Windshirt (Graphite), and MK Granite Creek Short (Mushroom) which attracted a lot of attention by fellow sailors in the crowd. Thank you Mountain Khakis for your support as the Official Apparel Sponsor of Team Tangent. We look forward to our next adventure!