Tips & Technique
Portable Emergency Sled for Backcountry Skiing
One of the more unglamorous aspects of being a ski mountaineering guide is carrying all of the emergency gear which adds considerable weight to your pack which you hope you will never have to use. At the top of the list is an emergency sled, which is generally expensive dead weight. I’ve owned a variety […]
Super Stove Board Construction
It only takes getting three liters of boiling hot water spilled in your lap once to realize the importance of a good stove board for heavy winter camping. Boiling water and melting snow are major pastimes of winter camping and the hot little camp stoves need all the help they can get to keep from spilling […]
Winter Camping – 2016 Improvements
On my first winter camping trip we brought a gallon jug of water, which quickly froze and left us with no water and 9 pounds of dead weight. Things have improved slightly since then, but I’m still learning little tricks of the winter base-camping trade which make life warmer, drier and better fed. Here are a […]
Skiing and Snow Anchors
I doubt that most visitors to Park City will ever need to rappel during a ski descent while on vacation here, but rope work and anchors can come in handy for ski mountaineering descents. At times it might be a full-on rope stretching affair like skiing the Grand Teton in low snow, and at other […]
The Feed
I’ve tried many eating strategies for backcountry skiing over the years. For a brief time, a friend turned me onto the 5 for $5 burgers from Arby’s, which was entertaining, but ultimately disgusting. When I first discovered GU, I liked the orange/chocolate flavor so much that I bought a case of it, only to throw most […]
Tiny Packs –
The Law of Luggage states: “The amount of stuff you carry will expand to fit whatever size backpack you have.” For this reason and a few others, I use a tiny little 15 liter pack for backcountry skiing in the Wasatch. Between racing packs and mechanized skiing packs, there are quite a few small packs […]
How to Build Wands
I know – the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Both of you. As detailed in my previous post, I’ve built a lot of bad mountaineering wands before arriving at this solution. I like this design as they stay put in deep snow for weeks on end, withstand wind, are easy to place, easy to […]
Ski Mountaineering Wand Making – Greatest Fails
According to Malcom Gladwell’s theory that a person can only achieve true mastery of an activity by doing it for ten thousand hours, I’m almost a wand building prodigy. This is nothing to be proud of (except if you are my mom) and came about accidentally when I was building wands to mark ski mountaineering […]
Wands for Ski Mountaineering – Part One
Wands are an obscure and trivial part of ski mountaineering, which makes them a perfect topic for straightchuter.com. I’ve carried thousands of wands, placed hundreds and actually used them for emergency navigation about five times, which made it all worthwhile. It’s hard to describe how calming and reassuring finding a wand can be when you […]
Slow Motion Uphill Kick-Turn Video
Uphill kick-turns are one of the essentials of backcountry skiing. In general, it is better to do a “walk around” turn to change direction, but when the slope gets too steep, kick-turns are the way to go. It’s hard to say that there is any one way that is better than the others as much […]
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