Sonora Pass
“This is a particular zone where you can snowmobile right to the top pretty easily. It’s a big, mellow field you ride up the back of and there’s this big cirque of giant, steep lines when you arrive. It’s about 800 to 1,000 vertical feet per run.
I’ve been skiing Sonora Pass for over 10 years, and when I started going up there, buddies would take me on their sleds and we’d go up there to build kickers. There was this big face that stood out and, back then, when I was younger, I was like ‘Man, it’d be really cool to ski that one of these days.’ And over the last few years, we have really skied it. It’s kind of a go-to thing these days, even my girlfriend skied lines up there and she’s a pretty casual skier.
It’s become pretty commonplace for us to go up to Sonora and the one line shown in this video kind of reflects how casual it is for us to go up there and ski it at this point. The zone in general is really gnarly, and there is a bunch of exposure, but I’ve skied it so many times at this point that I go up there and kind of go for it. I’d wanted to ski this particular line for a while and the conditions lined up and everything was perfect.
In reality, it’s so steep. You look over the top and there’s no convex; it’s so steep that it concaves all the way to the bottom. Dropping in, it’s probably over 55 degrees… But this is also the kind of place where everyone’s hangin’ at the bottom at the end of the day on their sleds drinkin’ beers with the boys, watchin’ everyone skiing lines. It’s a funny zone; even though it’s really gnarly we’ve gotten kind of comfortable and skied almost everything you can possibly ski up there. That face used to scare the shit of out me, but nowadays that’s what the first run of my day looks like. It’s a bit of a way to judge my comfort level and skill, and how it’s all changed over the years.”
South Lake Tahoe
“Two years ago, I was in Sonora with my buddy Alex ‘Sug’ Dorzinski and he brought a crew down from Tahoe, including Josh Daiek. We skied that Levitt Cirque in Sonora and I just said, ‘Fuck, Josh. You and me need to ski more often.’ For me, it’s fun to connect with people who you can one-up with; we can definitely feed off each other. We don’t really get the chance to link up too often but when we do, you’re going to have a rowdy day.
So, Josh and I had been playing phone tag all winter and finally he was like, ‘Alright, conditions are really good, get your butt up to Tahoe and let’s go ski this spot.’ I got off work at 10 after busting my ass in the cat and drove to Sug’s house right away. Got there at like, 1 a.m. and slept till 5 a.m.
We went out to this zone, which was about a 20-mile snowmobile ride to access; it’s way out. So we showed up—me, Sug, Nick Miles, Josh and some other Tahoe dudes. There were nine of us, and we pull around at the bottom of the zone and I’m lookin’ at this face and think, ‘Oh shit, this is gonna be one of those days.’ This whole thing was in amazing condition with spines everywhere and I was getting super excited.
We poked around, made a shuttle lap, figured out how we could sled lap it and then basically that whole day we just, non-stop start to finish, were skiing lines and pickin’ ‘em off one after another till the whole thing was tracked out. It was one of those truly epic days in the backcountry where everyone was on fire; all the guys skied crazy stuff. That air at the end of this video was a lot bigger and a lot scarier than I expected but the whole run was so sick that I was like, ‘I better fucking stomp this thing.’ I’m in the air thinking, Man legs! Let’s stomp this shit!
Everything I put on Instagram from that spot got amazing feedback. But I’m keeping the location really vague, as it’s a pretty unknown area. Tanner Hall hit me up and was like, ‘Hey man, could you tell me where that zone’s at?’ And I was like, ‘No fucking chance, dude.’”
Kiwi Flats (Mammoth)
“This is one of these lines where, yes, it’s inbounds, but it’s a 1,000-foot couloir with a cliff in the middle of it. When people talk about the hardest inbounds lines at ski areas, this one is often overlooked. It’s right up there with the others; it’s full blown fucking gnarly.
I’ve skied that thing so many times, and when I first moved to Mammoth we used to jump-turn down it and it was terrifying. Now, it’s all different. I took one of the locals, Scotty Donahue, up there and he’s used to seeing people ski it hard these days so just ripped the shit out of it like it was nothing. I was up top like ‘What the fuck, this used to be a tough thing to ski.’ And as it filled in this season, it became a real go-to for a lot of people, with less rocks to hit and whatnot. But no matter what, it’s intense; if you fall, you fall the whole way down. I know Garrett Russell tumbled down the whole thing years ago which was gnarly, and that’ll change your perspective on it. It’s really steep and exposed.
This video is a testament to how casual the line is for me now, I didn’t even feel the need to stop up top; just paused and rolled into it. As you develop as a skier, it’s crazy how the gnarliest things become kind of casual. But, yeah, that line is just amazing, especially with conditions like that. Couple turns, launch off the rock and land like you never left the ground; a perfect, classic couloir run.”
Mendenhall
“This is the classic, man. It’s just south on 395 from Mammoth by Convict Lake. You go and park at the bottom of the lake, and you’re lookin’ up, and on your right is Laurel Mountain and on your left is Morrison. Morrison is just this huge cliff face right across from the local airport essentially.
The Mendenhall Couloir goes straight down the front of Laurel Mountain, right down to Convict Lake. And, so, it’s 4,000 feet of steep couloir skiing. It’s one of the bigger, more prominent lines right off the side of the Eastern Sierra there. And it’s a huge mountain to hike—five or six hours for most folks. But, I’m into fully cheating the shit out of that as much as I can legally on a snowmobile. So, me and my buddy Brett snowmobiled up between Laurel and Bloody Mountain and we doubled up on my sled and skinned up to the saddle in between the two and put on our hiking shoes and walked up the rocks on the back of the mountain. We summited in like an hour and a half…
We got up to the summit as these other dudes that had hiked from the parking lot were getting up, and they’re like, ‘Wow! Where are you guys coming from?’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah… We parked the snowmobile right over there and walked up the back!’ They’re all like, ‘Oh, man… We’ve been walking for five and a half hours and left at sunrise this morning…’
We dropped in and skied that one and, man, that thing is so big. It’s so big that it’s hard to grasp the scale of it while you’re in the middle. You ski really fast for a while and it feels like a whole lot of mountain, and you realize you’re maybe halfway down. We hit literally every kind of snow; it wasn’t a glorious powder run, but I’d never skied it before so I was stoked. That was a cool one—the thing had to be 100 feet wide.”
3D
“People always ask about lift-accessed backcountry at Mammoth. And, you know, Mammoth has an open-boundary policy and you can ski off it any way you’d like. But it doesn’t really get you anywhere because there’s no real ridgeline to ski out on.
June Mountain, which is owned by Mammoth, just 20 miles north, is a small ski area which puts you about halfway up the ridgeline that takes you into a wild zone called the Negatives, so you basically ride the chairlift up, ski out of bounds and hike up another 1,000 feet or so and it puts you kind of on top of all this stuff to ski back there—amazing backcountry terrain. And, honestly, everyone is going to give me shit for telling you guys about this, but it’s not a secret; it’s pretty well-known and there’s definitely more backcountry traffic there than ever.
3D is a very prominent couloir off the front of the ridge there and I’d never skied it before this winter. It’s always been on my list and I kind of never got around to doing it. And this video of the line is cool because I throw my backpack and shit down in there and jump into it. You can climb down those rocks properly but I’m a really shitty rock climber. There’s a rope in the middle you can use to get down, but the snow had melted and frozen so much that the rope was frozen into a giant block of ice. And, also, I’d gone up there to ski a different line, so I didn’t have my crampons or ice axe or anything because the line I intended to ski doesn’t require any of that. I regret not bringing the gear, though; I always bring my ice axe and crampons with me but that day I didn’t.
So, I climbed down into this thing and was like ‘Well, it’s only about 10 more feet… I guess I’ll just jump in….’ And after I threw my bag down there it was like, ‘Well, now I have to jump…’ It’d be really embarrassing to walk back to the resort like, ‘Hey! My skis and backpack are at the top of that couloir, can someone get those for me?’
It’s cool when things like that work out, but I wouldn’t recommend taking that approach to backcountry skiing, especially because I was solo that day. Not the smartest way to go about things, but it did work out. After that, it was fuckin’ sweet. Not a lot of other ways to describe it, it’s just an awesome run. Conditions were perfect and it was a good call skiing that line, though I should probably work on my rock climbing skills so I don’t continue jumping into things like that.”
ALSO READ: FREESKIER’s guide to skiing Mammoth Mountain like a champion
