By: randosteve|Posted on: March 10, 2008|Posted in: Broken Link to Photo/Video, Inspire | 19 comments

Approaching the crux

I’ve had a few days off back in Jackson after getting home from Europe. I’m glad too because I’ve been having a bugger of a time getting my internal clock reset and have been waking up at 3 and 4am the past few days…though daylight savings time helped a bit yesterday. The weather has been pretty good here and I’ve been getting out skiing a bit, but while some Teton ski lines look to be in great shape, others have been hammered by lots of wind up high over the past few weeks.

Besides getting my sleeping habits back in order and dealing with some jet lag, I find I’m having a little trouble dealing with the transition from powder skier/rando racer to ski mountaineer. I know it’s really all in my head, but it’s nice to kind of progress from steep lines to even steeper, hairier lines, and I haven’t really skied anything very exciting this year yet. I’m also finding myself really looking to ski things when they are in prime shape, as opposed to hacking my way down some wind scoured, sustrugi laden couloir, or doing a 100′ rappel over a cliff that I know fills more under the right conditions. In the past, when I was younger, I probably would have skied these lines just to say that I skied them or to stay in shape, but it seems as though I’m getting pickier and pickier as I get older.

I went one for three (video tomorrow) in my objectives last week and unfortunately I had to ski some snow that wasn’t the greatest…and a line that I’ve skied a few times already. Buy hey…that’s ski mountaineering…right? Anyway, I think I need to just ski some more of the classic steeps to get my confidence back up before going for a line on my tick list. Hopefully conditions will continue to improve for some of these descents and I can get my mind right as well.