Tri Chutes

Tom, Will and I hiked up the White Pine trail to the Tri Chutes on the west side of the west peak of the American Fork Twin Peaks. It was a bitter cold day. I had an extra layer on everywhere. I started hiking with my normal hiking gloves but they were too thin. My hands were freezing after just a few minutes of hiking. Will had new skis. He was hiking on Voile Vectors. They are about 95mm under foot. I was excited to be hiking with Will because I wanted to see him ski. He telemarks. After we lunched we pushed on up to the skier's left chute. Tom dug into the snow to test the snow pack. It broke after 22 taps (a technique he learned in a recent avalanche course). He pronounced the area safe to ski. Will got first tracks and did a super job carving beautiful telemark turns. I went next and biffed it after only two turn. The rest of the run went well though. We hiked back up and skied the middle chute. More first tracks. We found a few more little shots where we got 8 or 9 turns on the ski out. We were in the sun from our lunch area on through our skiing of the chutes. As we were on our ski out we were back in the shade of the valley. My face was so cold with the wind blowing on it. We had almost forgot how cold it was today. We also had a bit of excitement on the drive down the canyon. We spun out on one of the corners. Yikes.