Welcome to another episode of Tips Up. We are spending 4 days in a remote backcountry ski hut in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado... tag along as we score some of the best snow of the season!

We are going to skin about 1,800 vertical feet and I think somewhere between two and three miles to get into the hut. We arrived 9:21 in the morning. We drove from Breck to Montrose last night. We had a beautiful drive, no snow, clear skies, really cool sunset. And stayed in Montrose last night, woke up early this morning, and got to the trail head. The plan right now is for us to get all of our gear put together and ready, and hike up into the hut.
One of the big differences between a hut trip and your normal day trip for ski touring, or something like that, is the fact that we are bringing a ton of gear in. You'll see our packs are completely full with food, water, clothes for multiple days of skiing, clothes for hanging in the hut, and really just sort of supplies for living and having fun in the hut for the next three or four days. We had been monitoring the avi forecast as well as the snowfall around the area here for the past week or so to get a sense of what type of skiing we're going to be having, and we do have green light conditions. So that is, for mid-March, not something you always get, especially in a place like the San Juan. So what that means is that we can start skiing some steeper lines, some lines that would typically be really kind of off limits any other time of the year. So it looks like we do have a pretty stable snow pack.
We do have a bit of snow in the forecast, so the question is how much snow will actually fall, will that affect the stability, and will it create good skiing? I think if we had green light conditions, stable snow, and we got like four inches of snow, that would actually be kind of perfect because we could ski some really steep stuff and have some really soft turns. So we'll see how much snowfall we actually get, but I'm pretty optimistic about the ski conditions. Skiing in is fairly straightforward, I think it's 1,800 vertical feet, about two or three miles, however it does cross some pretty significant avalanche terrain. We're not super concerned about it on a day like today, given the snow conditions, but getting into this hut when it is actively snowing or when the snow is unstable can be a bit hairy. So we're lucky, in the sense that we don't really have to worry about that today.
Lugging all your shit all the way up to the hut?
I am not excited. My pack weighs about 40 pounds right now, it's going to suck.
So we just made it to the top... We're not at the top, but we just made it to the hut. It was 1,700 feet, about three and a half miles almost exactly. It took us nine hours, pretty easy approach. There was definitely a lot of avalanche exposure, basically the whole way, so I would definitely not want to come here when the danger is high, but from what we can see, the hut looks sweet, so I'm psyched to go check it out.
I've wrapped up the skin. We have made it to the hut, you can see it behind me. The hut is beautiful. We had a really nice skin in, the weather was sunny the whole way. It was actually our biggest problem was that it was too hot, we had a lot of very sweaty people on the ski in track today. But you can see the view around us, the terrain here is incredible. We, actually, on our way in just now, just saw a couple of guys put in a skin track right across the valley and then rip that big face in front of us.
So it seems like we do have some stable snow. We are going to have sort of spring lake conditions, which is really great for a place like this because most of the stuff around here is pretty steep. So we are going to go into the hut, and we'll give you guys a tour and sort of show you all around, but drop our stuff off, unload our packs, just because we do have a lot of clothes and shit in there that we don't want to be skinning with. And then we're probably going to do a little afternoon lap up in this bowl that is across the way here. You can see clouds are sort of rolling in. We do have some weather expected tonight, I think there's going to be a few inches of snow. We'll see, but it is definitely getting windy and there are clouds on the horizon, so we'll see.
A review, we are trying to figure out where to lay the skin track, on top of a very shallow wind slab right now. Tensions are high.
So his right here is the skin track into the hut, so every day when we've been skiing, this is where we've been coming back up. This is where we entered the hut, you can see sort of all our gear spread out around here. This is the main entrance to the hut right now, you can see they're sort of doing some work on it, and then there is another building right here that acts as the hutkeepers quarters. I believe that is sort of still work in progress as well.
But this is where you come in. Right here in the entryway is sort of where the gear staging area has been.