Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Skiing

Crystal Mountain Opening Day

I sent a vacation email to the team at work, dug the gear out of storage, packed the rock skis in the car, and headed down to Crystal Mountain this morning for Opening Day 2009.  Never having been to an opening day, I didn’t know what to expect.

On the drive down, I realized that a lot of schools had the day off. Sure enough, the hill was packed with a decidedly non-standard Crystal crowd. In fact, by the time I left, the lots showed evidence of being extremely full, all the way down through D lot.

With a crowd that big, the Chinook Express and Forrest Queen were very crowded. But hey, those were the only lifts that were open (aside from the bunny hill) and who am I to complain about skiing in early November for half price?

By noon, there were tracks starting to appear in Campbell Basin. The people putting in the effort for fresh tracks were being rewarded with two to three feet of good quality snow. That being said, anything off the groomed runs usually resulted in scraping a rock or three. If you have rock skis, use them.

While taking a break at the upper lodge around 12:50, I heard a rumor that REX was going to open at 1 despite the “we’re not opening this today” sign. I skied down and joined the small group that had gathered in front of the lift. We waited for about 50 minutes before finally getting on the lift. Towards the end, I admit thinking it wasn’t worth the wait, but boy was I wrong! I was probably about the 10th chair up and I didn’t waste any time bombing down into Green Valley.

Incredible.

That one run alone was worth the $30 lift ticket. Top to bottom untracked powder. I jumped onto a chair and watched it get tracked out as I rode up. On the second run, I did a little bit of hiking and got another huge run of fresh snow. By that point, the football field sized plots of untouched snow had pretty much disappeared, but I was in awe of the fantastic November skiing.

But yes, it is early season. You WILL hit rocks. Don’t take those brand new $700 skis with you, but do find a way to get out there! Ski season in Washington has arrived!

You can find photos in the photo gallery. They all have the title “Opening Day.” Also note that the text up to this point is a duplicate off a post I made for the SeattlePI website. I’ll keep a lot of the skiing stuff there, but I’ll still continue to cross post a few of my favorites.

One of my favorite parts of skiing is the people you meet on the lifts. For example, my first ride up was with a guy who said he hadn’t skied in 10 years. Another guy said, “Have you been locked in a closet?” “Close. A cell.” Turns out he got out of jail about a month ago. By the end of the lift ride, the ex-con had a potential job offer from another person on the lift. The second ride up was with two wives who had ditched their husbands to come skiing and were making fun of their guys for going to work instead of skiing.

There was a lot of discussion among the skiers at work about whether or not Crystal would be worth it since they only had 2-3 feet of snow which is barely enough to cover the rocks. I laughed all day as I thought of them sitting at work, especially as snow was blowing up into my chest on those runs down Green Valley. Seriously, when have you ever been skiing and though, “Ehh I should have been working today”? And as for the chest high snow (and I already twittered this): When you’re a 6’4" skier, it’s hard to get face shots, but the more accurate "nipple shots" doesn’t sound right.

One other thing I left out of the Seattle PI is that I saw my first real fight on the mountain. As we were hanging out around the bottom of REX hoping that they would open it, there was a lot of shuffling and jockying for positions in the line/blob. One guy was definitely mad (and I think he was drunk) but he was running through a wide assortment of foul language directed at the four teenage girls who had somehow camped in the front of the line. Eventually his berating moved onto someone else and he ended up throwing a punch. The crowd quickly subdued him and ski patrol jumped into action and escorted him away. I know we joke about “no friends on a powder day” but come on, it’s not like one spot in line is going to spoil your 100s of options from the top of that lift.

All in all, this was an interesting day. It started off as a groomer-cruiser which helped me get back into gear and also because the off-piste snow was sketchy. It ended with three runs that I will remember for a very long time. It’s probably the second or third best runs I’ve ever had. (Other’s in that category are the day at Crystal with Jay and Andy when we had the ski photographer and also the runs that Mike and I made off the top of Lone Peak.)

benmartens November 12, 2009 Skiing

SeattlePI Blogging

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the largest paper in the country to go online only for financial reasons. They’ve always had a decent web presence, but now they are really ramping it up. They have one specific reader blog which I have followed for a few years called Ski Junkies. The writers are volunteers and don’t work for the paper. Last fall I wrote an email to the PI asking if I could write for the blog too. I didn’t hear back and figured I had been rejected, but a couple days ago, I got an email asking if I was still interested. They were understandably busy this winter as they made a major business model change.

To make a long story short, I’m going to be an official blogger for the Seattle PI! We’re going through all the paperwork right now, but I should be ready to rock in a few weeks. There won’t be much to write about this summer, but I’m looking forward to having this as an outlet for ski content in the winter. I’ll let you know when my first post goes up on their site.

[UPDATE] Wow, they work fast. My headshot and bio are already up on the page. http://blog.seattlepi.com/ski

benmartens April 22, 2009 Skiing

One Million Vertical Feet

Since the 2005-2006 ski season, I have been tracking how many vertical feet I have skied with a Suunto watch. I skied a handful of times before that season, but we’ll just stick to that year since it’s when I really started skiing regularly.

Since that time, I have skied over one million vertical feet! I crossed the milestone last Tuesday during racing at Alpental. To put that into perspective, that’s like going 190 miles up in the air and skiing down. That’s just a little bit lower than the space station! Given the average ski slope (as calculated by my GPS data), that means I’ve traveled over 1500 miles on skis. That’s longer than the distance from Seattle to Minneapolis!

Some other stats about the first million vertical:

  • It took 843 ski runs over 59 days to accomplish this.
  • The biggest single day ever was 62,000 on March 8 of last year for the American Cancer Society fundraiser.
  • At just about every resort I visited, the average ski run was between 900 and 1200 feet high.
  • I visited 18 different ski areas.

Here’s to the next million!

PS. That lovely photo is one of the rejects from our photo shoot last winter. Bernard asked us to sign waivers so he could sell the photos and I’m betting that’s one that got picked. Haha I hope it gets used in a magazine sometime.

benmartens February 18, 2009 Skiing

More Big Sky

There were a few more things about Big Sky that I want to share with you. First of all, I mentioned some great lines that we took down from Lone Peak. This photo shows a couple of the runs down through the Gullies and hints at one down the side of the mountain. We had many more runs down, but I don’t have a good picture to show them.

 

I also made a panoramic photo from the top of the peak. It’s not quite 360 degrees, but it’s pretty close. We could see all the way down to the Grand Tetons! Click on the image for the full file (8MB) or view the nicer HDView version.

And finally, I took a bit of video on the snowmobile tour through Yellowstone. Riding one handed is a bit difficult so please pardon the shaky video. The first portion of the video is just a normal part of the ride. The last 20 seconds or so show us passing a herd of bison. While this looks very close, we actually came much closer to another herd, but I wasn’t able to get video because I was too busy trying not to die.

benmartens February 5, 2009 Skiing, Travel, Video

Ski Geek

Somehow, every activity I participate in is turned into a geek project. Skiing is no different. This season, I have been carrying around the Garmin GPS that I purchased earlier in the year. It keeps a signal inside my coat and dutifully tracks my position every few seconds.

I can load this into my National Geographic topographical map program and get an interesting view, but I wanted more. I want to know my top speed, how much time I spent in the lift lines, how fast the lift was moving, which lifts I rode the most, etc.

To that end, I’ve started writing a program to analyze the GPS data. The raw statistics are fairly simple and I was able to get a display churned out pretty quickly. Lately I’ve been stuck on trying to automatically figure out when I was on a lift. On the surface, it seems easy: you’re on a lift when you’re going up. That’s not always true. Runs have rises in them and lifts have dips in them. So then I tried to say that any time I’m heading in the same direction for X miles and Y vertical feet then I’m on a lift. Even that has problems. What happens when you get off a lift and keep skiing straight down the backside of the hill? What happens when you get a couple errant GPS points that aren’t in line with the lift? There is enough drift in the data to make it very complicated. If I can’t get the automatic solution figure out, I’m going to have the user tell me where the lifts are the first time and then I’ll save that data. I want to move on to getting either a 2D or 3D map working next. After that I’ll work out a good way to display all the statistics about the day and each individual run.

If you’re interested in seeing the code and/or helping out, it’s all available on codeplex.

The picture below shows the track from my last ski day at Crystal Mt in the National Geographic software. My software will end up looking something like this but with more data and information on the screen.

benmartens January 28, 2009 Gadgets, Geek, Projects, Skiing

Big Sky, MT

Today marks the start of my big winter adventure. For the past few months, JayA, AndyC, MikeDu and I have been planning a ski vacation in Big Sky, Montana. I’m driving to Spokane tonight and then I’ll meet them at the Bozeman airport on Wednesday around noon. Thursday and Friday we’ll ski Big Sky and then Saturday we’re going to take a snowmobile trip into Yellowstone to see Old Faithful. We have reserved a condo right by the lifts so this should be an incredible trip.

None of us have been to Big Sky before, but it has a great reputation for challenging terrain and very short lift lines. They also have a tram up to the top of Lone Peak so I’ll get to add that to my list of lift technologies that I’ve experienced. If you want to know more about the ski area, check out this article from Powder magazine. (It’s the same one I linked to a couple months ago.)

benmartens January 27, 2009 Skiing, Travel

City League Racing

I joined the Microsoft ski racing team again, and Tuesday night was our first race of the season. If you look at the results, you’ll notice that I’m the only one of our 12 members who wanted to ski. I guess we’ll start off the season at the bottom of the points which is good. We wouldn’t want anyone to get their hopes up.

The mountains have been dry for a couple weeks so the snow was hardpacked. Thankfully the groomers had taken care of some of the runs so it was actually a lot of fun. The racing was fast and the course held up well. I lost both my races but I was fairly happy with my times. I placed in about the 43rd percentile which is up 10 points from my average last year. Since you get moved up or down weekly depending on how fast you ran, you’re basically guaranteed to win 50% of your races. My goal is to move up in the overall time rankings.

There is an old news segment on YouTube which shows what the racing is like. It’s over 20 years old so the gear and skiing styles are a bit goofy.

benmartens January 22, 2009 Skiing

Crystal Clear Skiing

We have been in a dry spell recently. Strange weather has given us 50 degree temps at the top of the mountain and temps below 40 in Seattle (6000 feet lower.) This has resulted in rock hard conditions on the mountains after they freeze overnight. Sounds like a terrible time to ski, right?

Wrong. On Saturday, I headed to Crystal Mt. with ClemensK. I was a bit nervous to be there with someone who grew up skiing in Austria, but thankfully I don’t think I slowed him down too much.

We started off on Forrest Queen for some fresh groomers. The hard snow challenged us to make good use of our edges, and we had a blast bombing down the runs. Next we spent some time in Green Valley. After the sun had a few hours to beat down on the south facing slopes under Rainier Express, we headed over there to explore some stuff off the groomers. We found nice soft bumps and had fun playing over there. After a quick stop in the lodge, we ventured up the High Campbell lift. Ski patrol was at the bottom questioning our skills before we headed up the experts only lift. They were right to do so because it was really nasty up there. We picked our way down one run and decided to finish out the day under Rainier Express. Unfortunately I never got to show him the Northway Lift. There are not many south facing slopes over there and it must have been like a hockey rink. We left around 3:30 as the shadows started covering the mountain and freezing up our favorite runs.

All in all it was a great day. The skies were an amazing shade of blue and you could see FOREVER. We spotted Baker to the north, Adams to the South, the Olympics an Puget Sound to the west, and we could even see over the Cascades into eastern Washington! Here is a map to show you just how far we were seeing. The red dot is Crystal Mountain.

I was able to snap a 180 degree panoramic photo from the top of High Campbell which gives you a little idea of what we were looking at or better yet, view the panorama with HD View. Click on the image below for the full size view. If you look far off along the horizon, you will see two peaks. The one closest to Rainier is Mt. St. Helens and the other is Mt. Adams. You can see more photos in the photo gallery.

All week I heard people whining about how terrible the conditions were. I’d like to thank each and every one of them for staying home and keeping the lines short for us. We racked up just over 29,000 feet which ranks as my second biggest ski day behind only my ski marathon last spring. It was a great workout and much better day than either of us were expecting.

[UPDATE] I like this panorama so much that I made it the header photo on the site.

benmartens January 19, 2009 Panorama, Skiing

Mt. Baker

The Mt. Baker ski area isn't actually on Mt. Baker itself. There's a road that continues a few miles past the ski area to take you to a nice viewing area of the mountain in the summer. I've never been all the way up there and was thinking about taking a ride there this weekend. After looking at their website, I quickly realized that's not an option.

They're still trying to get the road cleared and are having to plow through snow that up to 20 feet deep. In the four day work week before the Fourth, crews cleared a total of 1/3 of a mile. There are lots of rocks in the snow which bust the snowblower and cause downtime for repairs.

You can see more information about the effort on the WSDOT site and their Flickr gallery.

benmartens July 9, 2008 Motorcycle, Skiing

Skiing in June

A guy on my team at work, MikeD, has been talking to me about backcountry skiing for the past year. He did it for a long time in Colorado before moving to the Seattle area. He finally convinced me to give it a try, so Friday morning we set out for Camp Muir on Mt. Rainier.

The hike starts off at Paradise at an elevation of 5400' and goes directly up the mountain to Camp Muir at 10,188 ft. That camp is the basecamp for groups attempting to make the summit at 14,400'. Our hike was about 4700 vertical feet in 4.5 miles. That's about constant 20% grade which is much steeper than most road hills you'll encounter. For comparison, Lombardi Street in San Francisco is 31.5%. This route was steep.

Normal ski gear won't work for something like this so I rented a few things from Marmot Mountain Works in Bellevue. I got an avalanche beacon (for being rescued or for locating the position of a fallen skier), fat powder skis (Black Diamond Vertex 180s with a 100mm waist!), special climbing ski boots and climbing skins for the base of the skis. The skis have special randonnee bindings on them. The heel of the binding can come out of the ski and hinges on the toe. The skins that stick to the bottom of the ski allow you to slide forward but give you traction when you step uphill. What all this gear allows you to do is climb straight up a hill on your skis in a fairly comfortable motion. It took a few steps to get used to but after the first five minutes I was in the groove.

We expected to hike the first mile or two with our skis attached to our large ~30lb packs. Boy were we surprised when it started snowing well before we even reached Paradise! By the time we got to the parking lot, the Subaru was plowing through 5-6 inches of fresh snow and it was still coming down fast. (3-4 more inches fell while we were there and a foot was expected by Saturday morning.) While we were in the parking lot, I heard one of the summit guides talking to someone at Camp Muir. They had 40mph winds, zero visibilit8y, and extreme avalanche danger up there. Everyone was snowed in. Yikes! We knew we probably wouldn't be able to get all the way to the camp but decided to go up as far as we could.

Mike led the way and we started plowing our way up the trail with Mike being nice enough to break a trail through all the fresh snow. I made it less than a quarter of a mile, vomited, and felt like I was going to pass out. WHAT?! It was one of the most embarrassing points of my life, but thankfully Mike was very nice about it even though I'm sure he wondered what he had gotten himself into. It took about 20 minutes for the feeling to pass. My only guess is that the combination of ascending 5000 feet in the car and then going at 100% full steam ahead a few minutes later was just too much change all at once. I should have done some laps around the car or something.

Mike offered to show me how to assess avalanche danger to give me some more time to recover. We headed off the main trail, found a suitable spot and started digging. Basically you are digging a deep pit to look for the different layers of snow and see if there are any large variances that could sheer off. The snowpack looked pretty good so there wasn't much danger down there. I was amazed that there was still 6-10 feet of snow in most places.

After that, I decided I was ready to push on, and from there on, things went much better. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't able to keep up with Mike, but I was able to set a steady slow pace. Actually it was probably about half the speed that he was going which was still embarrassing, but at least I was moving uphill again.

When we reached 6150' feet, we stopped to eat some food. We had been on the hill for a couple hours now and it was time for a break. By this point the weather was getting really nasty so Mike and I dug a snow pit, sat down inside and at our lunch. As we sat there, one of the guided summit groups came back down past us. They had made it up to Panorama point at 6900 feet and decided it was too bad to continue. After finishing our lunch, we decided that we should probably head back as well. While I readily admit that I would not have made it to Camp Muir at that pace, I would have liked to keep going at least a bit further. Unfortunately it just wasn't safe to keep going. The ski down was going to be very difficult because we couldn't see much ahead of us.

In retrospect, we could have picked a better route down, but it was still incredible to be skiing down huge open valleys with at least 10 inches of fresh snow. Those fat skis were incredibly fun and gave me a lot more flotation than I'm used to. We ended up being about a mile west and a little lower than the trailhead so that meant it was time to put the skins back on and continue the hike.

When we got back to the trailhead at Paradise, we headed into the lodge to change into some dry clothes. Komo4 news was there with their video cameras interviewing people. You can see the news video and read the accompanying story on the Komo4 news site.

All in all it was an incredible day. I've spent many ski days in conditions like that before, but it was a shock every time I remembered the date was June 6. I can't thank Mike enough for answer all the questions I had about the whole process, for breaking trail the entire trip, for putting up with my crazy sickness at the beginning, and for waiting for me to catch up the whole trip.

The whole event was an order of magnitude harder than I had expected. I knew it would be a challenge, but I considered myself in fairly decent shape. Wrong. Carrying a 30 pound pack and tying 5 pound weights to your feet while climbing up a 20% slope was an incredible challenge. We ended up hiking over 3 miles and 1200 vertical feet throughout the day which isn't too shabby.

I do want to try it again, but I have a lot more training to do. Hopefully Mike will be willing to take me up again, but next time I'll probably choose a smaller hill to tackle and I'll train heavily before we go. I'm considering buying some leg weights and wearing those on our weekend hikes since those don't usually stress me out too much. I'm also considering attempting to make it to Camp Muir later in the year when most of the snow has melted. The last two miles will still be on a snowfield, but we shouldn't be running into a blizzard! This trip put a damper on my thoughts of summiting Rainier next year. I'll have to see how the second attempt at Muir goes later this year.

I didn't take many photos since I spent most of the day trying to keep up with Mike. Thanks to Mike for sending over some of his pictures. You can find them in the photo gallery in Skiing > Paradise. The pictures didn't come out great but it's due to the heavy snow that fell all day!

benmartens June 9, 2008 Outdoors, Skiing