Egypt Lake

So ... I have information that may be of interest. I completed my first over night ski trip in the wild! I'm still new to this whole blog thing as evidenced by the dismal number of posts that I have done but I will try my best to recount this incredible adventure in full.

So I went with two friends to Egypt Lake which is just west of Sunshine Ski Resort through Healy Pass. It was about a 12km trek so it really should have been easy but we didn't really rent the most ideal skis for the trip so that's really what made it an adventure. The problem with our skis were as follows. Normally for these kinds of trips where you are climbing alot of hills you need to have skins which make it very hard for you to slip back, regretably we did not have these skins I guess we thought we were true mountain men or something at any rate the skins were not used. We also should have had what are called alpine skis which are alot wider and have hard boots that you can lock down at the heel for going down hills (similar to normal down hill skis) we did not have these kind of skis. We elected to go with the cheaper but flimsier "light terrain" skis which are essentially cross-country skis with a little support around the heel and with metal edges. They are very difficult to go down hills with especially hills laden with tons of powder which is what we encountered. To put it in prespective if you have alpine skis with skins you can do the trip that we did in a day. Hey if you really pushed yourself hard you could do maybe even in half a day. However, because we had our skinless "light-terrain" skis it took us two days skiing basically from sun up to sun down and we did have to do a stretch in the dark that was really exciting.

So equipment deficiencies aside the trip was really really really exciting. There's something about going through mountains in winter that is just absolutely astounding. To illustrate this I am going to post quite a few pictures I hope you enjoy them and I seriously recommend we try doing a trip like this some time. Hopefully the pictures capture the beauty of the untamed Rockies as well as the exhausting nature of having to climb those hills with the wrong kind of skis. Live and learn I suppose, live and learn!