Skiing in Mexico? New Mexico you dickhead! Tacos? Taos you piece of shit! 2019, let’s do it!

[NMSKI]

Day 4 on Friday started out nice. Only a tiny bit of wind and plentiful sunshine. I warmed up on a pristine groomer then skied the trees under lift 2. After that decided I wanted to make a hike up to the far reaches of West Basin to attempt to find the entrance to Wonder Bowl. It wasn’t too bad to find, views were amazing and it skied great.

I took lift 2 back up to the top and took my skis off to hike again, but saw a couple people skiing down Kachina Main and the lift was running. I high-tailed it over there to lift 4 up to Kachina basin but when I got there the lift was stopped and the liftie said that it wouldn’t open today. Must have been patrol up there. Oh well, did another high speed groomer, then back to the top.

At the top of 2 I made a hike/traverse all the way to where Tresckow ridge splits off to the kachina hike and traversed through the trees and dropped into Tresckow proper. Wow, this north facing, off the beaten path run still had nice powder! Gotta work for it a bit sometimes I guess.

At the base I took lift 1 up and skied Ernie’s into the natural halfpipe that meets North American which held some nice soft snow.

Had an early lunch inside the St. Bernard which was amazing. Reuben croissant and soup, then headed back out for one last afternoon at my favorite place in the world.

I took a lower traverse under lift 2 towards West Basin and found a gate at the rope line letting me enter Oster and Spitfire without having to hike and deal with the extremely gnarly entrances up top. I had never skied these runs before. These reminded me of Tower 3 at Jackson in terms of pitch, width and snow quality. Did this a couple times. Really nice.

Did a few groomers, got some water at the whistle stop cafe, then did a hike up to Stauffenberg to finish myself off. On my way up there were some slow ass hikers that I passed and one of them had a BMR (blue mountain racing) jacket on! I harassed the shit out of them on my way by. Stauffy was filled with chalky wind blown and so so nice. Planned to do it only once but had to go back one last time.

After that I skied down to the children’s center to get my kids for a top to bottom run with them and my mom. My kids are making parallel turns finally, skied all over the mountain this week, and my son is obsessed with bumps!

Had such a great time. I haven seen coverage like this at Taos since the 90’s, and it opened up a lot of terrain that usually isn’t open or wrecks the skis. Already dreaming up my trip for next year.


Views from atop west basin



Stauffy


Wonder Bowl




Spitfire


The Y


Mom and kids


Silly faces at Apres!

[GrilledSteezeSandwich]

Nice report and pictures.  Your lunch sounds good..

[GrilledSteezeSandwich]

 

Also nice that Taos is an annual family tradition.  It’s part of the schedule. See you at Blue this week. 

[NMSKI]

I just stumbled across this video of Daron Rahlves skiing High Somewhere to Hidden Chute at Taos last Tuesday.  Would have been cool to cross paths him that day.  I must have been close because its a small mountain we were all over West Basin and we skied that same run (except I stayed off that spine in order not to risk death).  

 

[toast21602]

I thought that was you for a second and got super excited.