Fish and Pow in Lofoten
Got to go to the Lofoten archipelago in Norway again this year. Can't count how many times I've been there now, but the place never stops to amaze me.
Don't think there is anywhere in the world where the skiing is as close to the ocean as in Lofoten. Peaks with 360 degrees ocean view and lines ending literarily on the shore is seally special. This is the islands of sontrasts, snow to water, white to blue, storm to sunshine (in minutes), beach to mountain, ski to surf.
Lofoten is a mountainous row of islands above the arctic circle, stretching far out into the Northern Sea off the Northern Norwegian coast. Traditionally it's all about fishing, as this is where the North Atlantic Cod gather to party every year. Now it's just as much about tourism, mostly by the kind that drive around in their campers to look at the scenery in the summer, but also an increasing number of climbers, surfers and in winter skiers and snowboarders find their way to this magic place.
Check out the Shred Television Shredisode from our stay in Lofoten:
Having a clothing sponsor with a back country ski wear line named after this place helps a lot when making excuses for going up there year after year. This time I teamed up with a big bunch of my fellow Norrona riders for a photo and video shoot, hung out at the Camp Lofoten back country ski event and then did a bit of guiding. Of course I made sure to have some spare time to catch a few waves in between, and watch some of Europe's best surfers who happened to be there enjoying Lofoten in their way, video.
Working on setting up my excuses for next year's trip to Lofoten now...
In like a lion
A more relaxed kind of March Madness comes in from BackSide athlete Evan Stevens up at Valhalla Mountain Touring:
Well, March is almost over, and here is a video I made in the beginning of the month, but I have been WAY too busy skiing powder to remember to post this one on the blog. 3-4m snowpack right now, no persistent weak layers, cold fluff everywhere from summits to valleys. Enjoy the video!
Cold Smoke Continues in BC
A La Nina winter continues to bring deep, cold snow to the interior of BC. K2 BackSide athlete Evan Stevens has been busy ticking off new lines and deep descents in the Valhallas, and sending enough video to make anyone jealous. Check out this look at a new run called "Fireball" at his backcountry lodge, Valhalla Mountain Touring.
Norwegian coastal pow
Winter usually starts slow in Norway, and normally has it's high when lifts are closing and slush cups are on in most other places. January has been really good this year though, and the west coast has been at it's best, receiving one big storm after the other and staying cold enough for the rusult to be pow.
Photo: Sverre Hjornevik - www.digitalnatur.no
There are lots of little resorts and ski hills on Norway's west coast, that are really worth visiting on a powder day. Weekdays you can find yourself pretty much all alone in the lifts some days, and mostly it's just the locals and no tourists skiing threre at all this time of year. Myrkdalen near Voss is one favorite, with it's non existing liftlines and pretty much endless sidecountry terrain as long as you don't mind a little Norwegian bush-skiing at the bottom, and got some a cross country skating skills to pull out of your backpack for the road back. Here is a little edit from one of the good days I've had there this month:
-Torkel
Cover story - Brant (SE)
Ended up on the cover of Swedish ski mag Brant's latest issue. Guess the front page is pretty much the high score of the ski photography game, well maybe after a giant billboard right across the street from the School of the Swedish Bikini Team. ... Stoked. Thought I'd just share how me, my K2 Rockers and photographer Mikael Pilstrand ended up with the shot.
This was actually the winter of 2009. I was schredding the Alps along with Pilstrand and now deceased Fredrik "Frippe" Ericsson, who tragically died on his way up to try and ski K2 this summer. We had hit up the Italian Dolomites, gotten some good snow, good coffe, good pizza and some really nice Couloir runs in there, before heading to France and Frippes place in Chamonix to get a piece of the big dump there and on both the Swiss and Italian side of the Mt Blanc. The alps were getting pounded and we were in another ski area every morning welcoming it with open arms (and a pair of rockered skis, at least mine).
Frippe in Canazei, Dolomites, Italy.
Chamonix.
Anyway. I decided to make it east again, and got on the train to Switzerland, to the town of Disentis and the ski area where a dump like this can last for weeks before it is all tracked. Pilstrand joined for a day before going to a job in St Anton, Austria, and it turned out to be quite productive. It's of course a luxury to be in an uncrowded place like Disentis when the conditions are perfect, but of course there are a couple other factors who needs to be thre in order to get the cover, for example a photographer that has got his shit together, to put it that way. Pilstrand is experienced and quite on top of things, and we actually ended up with two covers that same day.
See what I mean... even in the piste there is hardly any tracks... And yes that stuff over there is lift access. More correctly, it is actually under the lift.
For me that day and that cover is pretty much the essence of what I'm in this game for. Big fields of untouch pow to make some slashing telemark turns in. Then I'm happy and can go home .... or get on the lift and do it again.
Taking shots like this can be a hazzle though, because it steals a lot of time that could have been spent on a couple of additional lines instead, but at least when it ends up on the cover that makes the wating seem a bit more worth while. Another good thing about this show is that it was taken in a line and not just as a one-shot-wonder. That way as a skier you get a bit more out of it, doing some real skiing when it happens and not just a turn for the camera. This was on a ridge with nice light coming in from the side, where Pilstrand could find a comfy position, sit back and regret that he had stopped using snus, and do some shooting with the tele lens as me and Austrian skier Tine Hüber did a couple of laps and had some fun at "work".
Hoping for another winter of the same deep pow!
-Torkel Karoliussen /K2 Backside Team
My favorite K2 dealer in the Alps
There are tons of ski resorts and ski towns in the European alps, with, naturally, a bunch of sport shops. A lot of these have got their shit together with a fat K2 lineup in store, and one of them is my definite #1 choice.
Engelberg is a favorite spot for pow hungry skiers and snowboarders from all over the world. Even the Swiss themselves, who often try to avoid the herds of foreign snow destroying intruders by staying in the few local secret spots left in the country, can’t deny Engelbergs quite unbeatable combination of easy access, perfect mix of Alp village feeling and freeride spirit, good snow statistics, high altitude and extremely easy accessible grand freeride terrain.
Heli skiing, only it's the thing you're sitting in that spins, it's attached to a wire, it's full of asian tourists and plays really really bad music.
... and you can skip the guide, ride where ever you want and slide right into this killer terrain straight from the piste.
For me there is even another reason for always swinging by Engelberg when I’m in the Alps: Dani’s Okay Freeride Shop. 100% dedicated, 100% freeride and backcountry focused and 100% welcoming and laidback feeling is the stats for this place. Dani, who is a skier himself, though with a pair of worn out knees that he’s working on a pretty high tech hardware solution for, runs the place pretty much himself and is the man to come to when the pow is getting deep and you need to get some rockers, when you’ve got a weird gear problem or when you just want to have a coffee and check your emails to see if your girlfriend has decided to terminate your relationship because you have been “snowed in” for too long, your bank account to see if your mom has transferred any money or the snow forecast to see if the Snow God is going to be your daddy for the next week too.
coffee machine, couches, beer, ski mags and ski movies in the chill out deptmnt
very experienced super skilled technicians in the back
advanced telemark binding costomizing... Okay, no probs.
Dani is rockin rockers, flying the K2 flag high, renting out the fat planks and always greeting you with a smile, at least if you bring him some snus.
Big ups to Dani and Okay Shop, and see you there this season too!
-Torkel Karoliussen
Fall Prep Work
While many of us are getting prepared for ski season with longer runs or tuning up our skis, the ski operations and guides are doing their own tune-ups. K2 BackSide athlete Evan Stevens sent us this look behind the scenes up in British Columbia, where he's getting things ready for winter at his backcountry lodge, Valhalla Mountain Touring.
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A Month in Alaska - 2nd Half
(This is the second post about this trip, first post can be found here.)
After early success for the team on Mt. Bona and Churchhill, we pondered our options for the remaining two and a half weeks. The original plan called for hauling sleds 25 miles down the glacier, but with low snow levels, our pilot had offered to drop us to the south in a massive cirque of Alaska prime time...easy decision!
A new and improved base camp was established right in the center of every terrain feature possible - we just had to avoid the crevasses! There are only a couple of peaks with actual names in this area and the rest are referred to by their elevation. One of the highlights was Point 10,170 with it's views across to University Peak and Mt. Bona.
For 14 or 15 days, we developed a dream routine of waking, eating, and skiing out of camp as our morning commute. Only 1 day did we have weather slow us down. In fact, the sun beat down so hard that our tents melted into the snow further every day. This set up some great corn and it had to be 4" deep on a slope we dubbed "Honey Hill" - as sweet as it gets for afternoon laps!
We linked the runs of previous days into day tours and explored the frontside and backside of the monster peaks around us. Long Alaskan days allowed for some late starts but meant we'd be sweating and slogging right out of camp. One of the more unnerving moments came when a serac avalanche fell off the peak to our south (in photo above) and blew snow debris nearly to our camp. Mostly though, we drifted further and further into our happy world of isolation while going wherever our skis could take us (in the photo below, the face above the lower skier was skied).
- -All you need is a pair of K2 Skis and some cord to make a clothesline-
With supplies dwindling, we were surprised at 6AM by a plane landing at our tent door. Paul, our pilot, said he had to get us out of there before weather rolled in and the schedule got busy. This was 3 days early and a bit disappointing at first but after arriving back in Anchorage just before Memorial day weekend, we organized a quick mountain bike tour on Denali National Park's only dirt road.
Over 3 days we shouldered our expedition packs, wore mountaineering helmets and pedaled our bikes thru grizzly country, occasionally detouring wide around families of cubs. Bugs were vicious as rumored and quite a change from our glacier experience. In fact, it being dusty and dry, we had literally gone from one extreme to another.
Of course that is usually the theme in Alaska!
Pray for Snow,
Chad Beeman - K2 CS Team
Narvik - the world's ugliest ski town
Hardly the average catalogue dream mountain holiday town, Narvik is railway, iron ore and architecture that still suffers from quick and cheap post-war rebuilding. Yet this was one of the highlights of my trips last winter and watching the footage now is fueling a crave for snow that has started to become stronger and stronger lately.
The terrain at Narvik's ski resort (or maybe we should call it hill, depends what time of year and what day you are there) is good, the slackcountry awesome and the surrounding mauntain areas unlimited. It's been haunted by some thin snow years lately, but late winter - even in May when the hill is closed (ironic?) - is the time to be there and it will always be good as the snow has accumulated thorugh winter, weather is better and new dumps can still occur.
Check more shots and read about Narvik in Norrøna Magazine
and this clip:
-Torky
A Month in Alaska - 1st Half
Inspired by extreme hunger for big and very remote mountains, 4 of us flew up to Anchorage on May 2nd this year and quickly found ourselves at the Ultima Thule Lodge in Wrangell St. Elias NP. We had arranged to be flown onto the Klutlan Glacier on the east side of Mt. Bona, about 20 miles from the Yukon border. Our intent was to spend 1-2 weeks climbing and skiing Mt. Bona and then spend the last half of the month in a nearby glacier valley skiing as many unnamed peaks as the weather gods would allow!
Only a few come to this corner of the park each year and we were the first team on Bona in 2010. Our gear pile included 4 weeks of food and fuel, 4 pairs of Backside skis, and 3 bottles of Whiskey (3 bottles was at least 1 too few).
On May 3rd, our pulse's raced as the glacier plane flew out of the Chitina River basin and towards Mt. Bona. In all directions we saw endless possibilities on thousands of peaks, many if not most, still without a name. The Turbine Otter’s skis glided to a stop at about 10K and we unloaded our gear in the much thinner air. Because of favorable glacier/weather conditions we had been able to land right at our intended basecamp and soon we had two tents and a cook tent surrounded by a wall of snow blocks.
The weather was nothing but stellar with no wind and mostly clear skies while temps dropped to -25F at night. On day 2 on the mountain we set our route to 12K and then on day 3, to above 14K. With no sign of wind or an incoming storm front, we decided to shoot for the summit on day 4. Originally there was to be a high camp but with beautiful weather and little desire to haul heavy packs, we opted for 6,500' of climbing in a single shot.
It was ridiculously cold at 3AM as we started our day and we all felt fatigue from the last couple of days - being totally unsure of the weather, we had rushed our acclimatization. By noon that day, we were skinning above 15K where the thinner air became quite apparent. Heavenly views encouraged us on and across an exposed and wind blown 2-mile long plateau between Mt. Bona and Mt. Churchill. Icy sastrugi made for an exhausting traverse, especially when coupled with frequent probing for hidden crevasses. It was just before the summit pyramid that myself and teammate Tony decided to call a stopping point as we were winded, still about 2 hours from the summit and facing a very long and crevasse-riddled descent. Tough call, as those decisions always are but I am here in Seattle injury-free now to tell the story and week 1 of 4 in the middle of nowhere was no time to push too far.
Adam and Eric still felt strong, so they pushed on to the top of the highest volcano in the US with gnarly snot-cicles growing from their beards. Tony and I spent the next couple of hours dodging crevasses as we skied 5,500' of nearly every snow condition imaginable. I'd call the skiing 'delightfully strategic'! Stoked to be in camp, we started melting water and awaited the arrival of our two comrades. A short while later, we heard celebratory yells as they slid into basecamp. They reported it being crazy cold up top but also crazy beautiful with views as far as one can see at 16,421'!
Rehydrated freeze-dried dinner was served in the late night sun as we all relished in the thought of a post-summit rest day!
All for now...more from the rest of the trip later!
Cheers,
Chad Beeman - K2 CS Team
