For a few years now Alex has wanted to explore a part of Crystal Mountain called “Southback” that we had never ventured out to. Southback {aka “South Back Country”} is an out of bounds, but avalanche controlled, part of the ski resort we call our home mountain. The area is massive, large enough to be its own small ski resort. There isn’t a chair lift to get you to the top, so you have to hike! That right there is why we’ve never been there before.
I am a lover of skiing and a lover of chair lifts. I don’t want to work that hard for my turns. From time to time I can be a bit whiny and demanding, so I had previously put the kibosh on hiking to go check out Southback. I’m not sure why, but this past weekend I became more open minded and decided to go for it with Alex.
Even though the sun was out, the ski day started off a little rocky for me. It just wasn’t my day. I got caught on a tree root, made some terrible turns, the lift lines were endless and I just was not feeling like I was very well put together. I needed to re-set so we decided to go in early for lunch before heading out on our adventure. I had packed some chili in our awesome Thermos, so we had a hot, “free” lunch to enjoy! After our bellies were full we set out to explore new territory.
Our excursion took us about an hour and a half from the time we left the lodge to the time we got down to the main lodge again. We rode up a chair lift then traversed across to the ski area boundary where we had to take off our skis and begin hiking. We probably only hiked for 10-15 minutes before we were able to put our skis back on and do some more extreme traversing. Once we finished our traverse we came out from the woods into an expansive wide open powder field. It was amazing!
At the same time as we arrived, the fog rolled in. We didn’t get the full extent of what we skied because the fog limited our visibility, but as far as we could tell, it was amazing! Both of us had a great run and made some awesome powder turns before we met up at the bottom of Silver Basin. All in all it was a fun change of pace, but I’m not expecting to do that every weekend!
