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[backcountry]

Here's a 4 day ski tour I got to do last week with Bela Vadasz, his friend Dave Riggs, and two experienced ASI customers Christian and Dave.

Bela loves to teach mountain skills, and does it in the most subtle and friendly way, it's never a lecture. It's really amazing. No suprise, he's had 30 years to hone his methods. Even though he was really guiding it all, skiing in front of his clients, he knows I want to learn, and let me go out front at times for some practice. We also had some pretty tough route finding challenges in white-outs, in crevassed areas, where I was happy to just be in the back playing with the camera.

I would have loved to stay for the next week, where Bela and some other IFMGA guides teach the AMGA ski mountaineering course, and also do the exam on past course completors. I could just be the water boy/ski waxer or something. I intend to keep going with these courses over the next 2 seasons, but this is really a serious endevor you have to practice a lot for, and gain higher alpine climbing and ski touring experience that's hard to achieve living in CA. I can't wait to drop it on Steph. Honey, it's not a vacation, I "need" to go to the Alps/AK/BC....it's a requirement to finish school. I'll let you married guys know how it goes.

straight lines are approximately where we were going uphill. squiggles are my guess on downhill travel



























Bela's cooking concepts are pretty cool. Garbage compactor bag full of snow, undera hanging stove. You're warned never to cook in a tent, but all you have to do is open two high vents a few inches. No getting in and out of the tent for snow, and the water spillage just makes the snow in the bag extra ready for melting. We used an MSR reactor, which was really fast. Dave rigged up some wire so we could hang it. This stove doesn't have a piezo (auto) ignitor, but hopefully will soon.












Snowmobiles can access much of the huge glacier highways in the area. The whole place was tracked out actually for 2/3's of our tour. Bela has skied this area 7 years in a row, in this April window when snowmobiles have harder snow to travel on. He's never seen a single person back there ski touring, let alone a snowmobile. There was some kind of snowmobiling hill climbing event the previous week, and jumping snow bridges in crevassed terrain apparently doesn't scare them either.








Travelling between these two passes was just half of our 2nd day. We knew the weather was going to deteriorate. Luckily it didn't get too bad.




Once we got onto the huge Tonsina Glacier, I really started thinking about coming back. This is a highway of Giant ski/climbing objectives on either side of the glacial valley, that would be a short distance to get dropped off for a week by plane or heli. Or ski tour in there, but It would really be worth staying awhile. Every peak had a few thousand feet of dreamy ski lines on multiple sides. I wonder if the heli operations get out to these guys. Seems a bit far and expensive for heli ski customers to fly to, when there is comparable terrain right above Richardson Highway.





































It took 2 days to figure out how to get through the lower Valdez Glacier below 3000'. You can't just plot a course on GPS by looking at the map on a glacier, and we had no beta on which parts of the glaciers to look for a passage. They are so wide and huge, that you can't see which way to aim, so you have to do some time consuming experimenting. Can't complain about being in such a fantastic setting while you schlog though!

It would have been kind of fun to document way points for a future tour. Might as well, someone will be psyched eventually to have this successful route beta.


we spent the better part of a day fooling around in poor visibility on this broken up patch, only to ski back uphill and camp for another try the following day.


The next day with okay visability, we still couldn't punch through a lower section that was just ice serac jumble spreading seemingling across the whole glacier. With 10" of new snow over ice mounds, moving over it was just taking too long trying to guess what we could step on or not. So we got off the glacier and went around this side glacial lake, regaining the Valdez a little lower. This was a really cool adventure in itself.






I really wished we had time to go down and check out this ice cave on the right. The opening was huge, and it looked like just rock as a floor.


Looking back up at the band of ice bumps spreading across the glaicer.


Then we hit more small icebergs a few miles down the glaicer, where Dave can be quoted as saying "let's just mountaineer it and get out of here". Love the use of the word mountaineer as a verb. We ice bouldered a few of them, following Dave to the Glacier Termini and lake.










Luckily the lake was frozen. Otherwise we would have had to cling to a steep slope of thick willows to scratch around it.


Not everyone/thing makes it out of Valdez alive.

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Mike Schwartz
www.thebackcountry.net
mike@thebackcountry.net

[deub]

Awesome AK!
Good stuff, thanks!

[towelie]

cool stuff. I'ts nice to see TR's from outside of Cali every so often. "we should just 'Mountaineer' it" ... I'm gonna start using that term next time I encounter a boulder field of lava rock (LOL).
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[Fly]

Mike,

Great pics. and adventure.
I just got back from skiing at Points North Heli in Cordova. We had such great weather that on our 4th day, we actually flew outside of the normal range and toward Valdez - the skiing was great and we more than likely were in the area you traveled through. The snowmobile tracks you mention near Thompson Pass were probably left over from the Arctic Man contest - snowmobiler pulls a skier on a tow rope up the pass and then slingshots them down the other side. Truckee/Squaw local Marco Sullivan won that contest this year and was skiing at Points North while I was there. I know it is not backcountry, but Points North serves up some of the best skiing terrain in the world.
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