The Beartooth Pass

For the last 3 Memorial Day weekends (including this recent one) I and a number of friends have made the trek from Bozeman down to the Beartooth Pass, a scenic highway going between Red Lodge, MT and Cooke City, MT over the Beartooth Mountains.

The reason we go down is that the pass is closed through the entire winter and is opened up on Memorial Day weekend and thus opens up many opportunities for fairly easily accescible backcountry skiing.

Well, this past winter was pretty brutal snow-wise to the Red Lodge area and the Beartooths. Meaning they hardly got any compared to years past. This made it nice and easy to hike up to one of the places we usually ski from, but it also meant a lot less snow on the runs themselves. The pass was closed due to high winds and blowing snow blocking the road so many of the places to ski were cut off, all except for Rock Creek.


Rock Creek is the longest run I've skied in the Beartooths and also the craziest, even in the best of conditions. It is a long patch of snow inbetween rock fields and cliffs, which isn't too interesting. The exciting part of the run is that the only entries (and there are 4-5) into the run are thin, steep chutes. These chutes are usually topped by large cornices of snow that are dangerous in and of themselves, and are notorious to coming loose and causing avalanches in the right conditions (usually warm). Luckily, the conditions weren't going to let any cornices come loose on this day.

Well, a couple of friends and I hiked the 30 minutes to get to the run with our skies and snowboards on our backs. When we get there we find out that some excitement has going on already. A young kid and his father have had an accident. Well, isn't that great. So we decide to not enter the run from that chute and we walked to another one.

The chute that we choose is probably the best one, but it isn't an easy entry by any means. The chute is basically cut in half--on one half glare ice, on the other half was a cornice. So either hold on for dear life with your edges gripping slick ice, or make a jump off of a cornice into slightly softer snow. As we were checking it out someone had gone down the icy part with a friend watching from atop the cornice. Well, we couldn't see the skier on the ice but he must have fallen, because the girl watching started yelling and screaming and watching with a look of horror as the kid must have been sliding out of control. This is what I had to look forward to.

Well, my friends and I decided that the best course would be to start on the ice and traverse over (with as few turns, if any, as possible) to the softer snow that was under the cornice. My first friend (a very advanced skier) went and miraculously made a few turns on the ice and headed down with little problem. Then my next friend was up, he is a snowboarder and has about the same amount of skill as me. He is also a very tall man and has large feet, and as such, his boot bindings hang over the sides of his snowboard ever so slightly. He decided to start on the ice and cut right over to the softer snow. But as he stood up and started, one of the bindings on his back edge hit the snow and basically took him off of his edge, sending him right to the ice and into a slide. He slid probably 100 yards down the slope, almost out of control. The chute was an hour glass shape and at the thinnest part he was heading for a very large rock outcropping and somehow managed to swing his board around and careen off of the rock by hitting it with his snowboard. All the while I'm looking on helpless from the top thinking about my run that is about to start. He got on his belly and was finally able to catch his front edge on the snow and claw his way to a stop. He suffered no injuries except for a few scratches and bruises. Whew!!

As I said, I was up next and it went mostly without incident except for a little slide that I was able to stop with my skis. The rest of the long run wasn't very fun as I was thinking about the experience at the top and the fact that I was super tired.

So, that was the main fun of my Memorial Day.