http://youtu.be/hTZ7cS16B9w
(best in full screen HD with the sound on).

I made a video to celebrate the first tour of the season. Be prepared for tentative early season/thin cover skiing, gratuitous skinning and scenic shots, hillmap stickers and wistful folk music from an old neighbor of mine and her band Prairie Empire.

I'm cross posting this a couple of other places as I am really proud of the video and it is a bit of a promo for hillmap which is a free (as in beer) mapping site that I wrote incorporating a lot of great suggestions from people on supertopo.

My wife and I moved to the Bitterroots of Western Montana from Seattle last month in Search of something like a less bavarian Leavenworth.

Sunday we took our skis out for the first tour of the Season and had a wonderful time booting and skinning through breakable crust and thinly covered logs and rocks to find some very skiable pockets of powder (and high winds) in an old burn along a ridge up high. We turned around before the summit but still managed to ski a couple thousand feet.


I'm not really sure what the locals call the route we skied but here it is on a map:

http://www.hillmap.com/m/ag1zfmhpbGxtYXAtaGRychALEghTYXZlZE1hcBjStzkM

Perfect low angle powder terrain.


Gear Notes:
Skis, Warm Coats, Ptex

Approach Notes:
An AWD vehicle could make it to the upper trailhead, we hiked from the lower.