Granite Canyon
Hannu, Finland
Trip in United States ~ Moderate difficulty
I decided again to skip the ‘Heart attack breakfast buffet’, which they served across the street from my motel and settled for a coup of coffee and a multi vitamin pill. Anyhow the rich elk steak from previous night was still making me feel more than content and by my age I have learned that my body will tell me when I need to have something to eat. The sad truth really is that all the sausages, bacon, eggs, mashed and squeezed potatoes and soft bread baked and cooked in fat and crease tend to pile up around the waistline. Even though it helps to improve the insulation and thus better the resistance against the cold, it won’t make climbing steep hills nor making long skinning any easier. Well, enough with provoking any nutrition or culinary debate and rather concentrating to the theme of the update.
The only problem, even I did have an idea of the terrain and surrounding places to ski, was that the most accurate map of the place was 1:100000. That meant that it was absolutely impossible to try to find out weather the runs from the ridges to the canyon bottom would take me there or end up on the top of the steep cliffs with drops to the void. Also, as I found out, it was very difficult to judge the ‘promising’ lines and routes from the top. There were trees growing all the way to the top, which made judging of the profile very difficult and even if the untouchable line would have looked appealing standing on the top of the ridge, it could turn out to be a dead alley drive. Especially routes to the Granite Canyon were seldom skied and there were truly many lines which were beautiful and tempting. However not knowing where they ended up and especially with no tracks, it was a hard but a wise decision for a lone wolf to look for something perhaps more obvious, rather than adrenaline routes. Now, I really want to emphasize that it is absolutely not advisable to do any kind of an off piste skiing solitary. I’ve come to be accustomed to do my trips by myself and so far judge my abilities to do different routes. I also do have the utmost respect for the possibility of dramatic changes in weather and the scale of the mountain environment. I do make a lot of U-turns.
My goal was to ski these two runs mentioned in the guidebooks (I actually had to climb the Head Wall several times before I managed to spot the right starts of them. Every time though was a great new experience of a great new line) which I eventually did, but this one is from that day and it turned out to be really something. I was standing on that Skyline ridge watching to the north, directly over the Granite Canyon towards the northern part of the Teton National Park. There were the summits of Buck Mountain, South Teton and the highest tip of the Grand Teton (4197m) in the distance to be seen. The closest peak to the north alluring the off piste skiers lies Mount Hunt, which offers rightly a safe haven for the magnificent big horn sheep and therefore is off-limits for human wanderers during the winter time.
I had to focus and bring myself back from that mesmerizing view and try to concentrate to the task ahead. In a coarse forest amongst the pine trees, I was standing on the top of a huge bolder covered with thick blanket of snow, looking down at the northern and shadowy side of the canyon. Underneath me the slope loosed itself, but seemed to continue quite a long way emerging and disappearing every now and then forming a sort of a funnel that may offer a passage to the bottom of the canyon. Only concern was that there were no other tracks going down my line, but rather more to the left and towards to a little more open gap in the woods. Remembering the slogan from the informative gate ‘This is your decision point’, I thought that well, I can always turn and climb back up with a hell of an effort if the s#%t hits the fan and I end up in a dead end.
From the bolder I started descending my chosen line using alpine jump turns via rather steep but nicely untouchable deep snow slope. After a few turns I noticed that even that the snow was perfect ‘baking powder’ snow, it was very stable and only slide that came, was the loose surface snow from my deep turns. I cannot think of more satisfying skiing than going down a steep mountain in a perfect weather with confident and enjoying the feeling of the powder snow splashing against your face. After about half a way down the face I found myself in a rather awkward position, since the funnel tightened up and I was actually on the top of the one of its sides on a ridge. There was probably a height difference of some twenty meters between me and the bottom of the couloir and the sides were very steep. I thought that the possibilities were for me to climb back up and try to find another way, since I am not a kind of a skier to make those huge jumps. I ain’t got the nerves for it. Then I noticed that the end of the ridge formed kind of a staircase of huge steps made from those big boulders and since there was so much snow, I actually could try to jump those steps little by little downwards. The good thing is that there is no photo footage of my jumping manoeuvres, ‘cause they’ve probably wouldn’t have made the cut to any ski film. Afterwards the couloir widened up to a nice mountain pasture and the route had a worthy finale with a possibility to perform few long, fast pace deep snow turns.
From the bottom of the canyon there was a distinguished path going back towards the skiing resort, but it obviously required a little bit of a sporty event, so I decided to enjoy few slices of that excellent buffalo jerky and some dried fruit for dessert. My break lasted about 15 minutes and I could enjoy that period without any disturbance by any two legged intruder. The pole shovelling and walking took about another twenty minutes before I grossed over the Apres Vous ridge and started slowly to descend towards the Bridger condola and the resort area. As I was going lower and lower I entered this mixed forest with pine, birch and aspen trees. I was just going over a little ridge and I had this strange feeling, that this would be exactly the kind of a place were moose would love to be back home. There they were, underneath a pine tree a momma and a baby moose and I almost hit the bigger one head on. I may have been more surprised, since she was the one that really was offended by the encounter and tried to charge at me. Fortunately I still had some momentum and added with sufficient amount of adrenaline boost, I could escape this extraordinary dilemma. And I thought that the avalanches and crevasses were the dangers for the skiers.
That evening I went to a legendary Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, sat down to a saddle by the bar and had a drink of a fine product from a famous distillery and saluted to the most memorable day on the skies… and of course to the majestic moose cow and her cub.
