Rendezvous Ski and Snowboard Tours • Established in 1986, Rendezvous Ski and Snowboard Tours operates three backcountry ski yurts high on the western slope of the Tetons near Jackson Hole and Grand Targhee Ski Resort. Our huts provide access to the Jedediah Smith Wilderness Area and Grand Teton National Park, where over 500 inches of legendary light, dry powder snow falls each winter. A variety of terrain from high mountain ridges and broad, low-angled powder bowls, to the steep and deep combine to make some of the best backcountry ski terrain in the lower 48.

Exum Mountain Guides • Exum offers group and private avalanche training, alpine and nordic ski tours, and ski and snowboard descents of the remarkable mountains of the Teton area. You will gain basic avalanche awareness, improve your skiing and snowboarding technique, and practice the use of avalanche rescue transceivers. Technical skills, such as steep skiing, rock and ice climbing, and rappelling are practiced during ski and snowboard mountaineering trips.

Trans Teton Ski Tour
By Matt Hart • Today was the final day of my AMGA Ski Guiding course. The last two days we spent crossing the Teton mountain range. This trip was amazing. Sunday morning we started the tour at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Our group of eight students and two instructors were on our way up the tram a half hour before it opens at 9am. It had snowed three inches the night before and it was extremely windy. I could feel the cumulative concern in the tram that morning. I think we all felt a bit worried as we heard the gusts at the top of the tram were reaching 50 mph and blowing the tram all over the place. It felt like an elevator to the arctic as we got off the tram at the top of Rendezvous... ding. We headed South West out of the ski area boundary above Cody bowl. After a short traverse we had to climb the top of Cody Mountain, it was a rocky and snowy face so we threw our skis on our packs and scrambled up.

From here Hans was our lead guide and he did a great job of getting us some pretty amazing knee deep powder turns in a lightly gladed area (here is a video of me skiing it). The weather was such that we were the only ones in the backcountry and on my own I would not have chosen a two day trans Teton trip in a snow storm and 50 mph winds. Our trip had started out pretty well. We all sort of helped navigate to our traverse. We traveled North West across the Middle and South Fork of Granite Creek and up a little ridge just before the climb to Housetop Mountain.

We had planned on camping around Housetop at 10,537 feet but that with the low visibility and high winds we decided to stop short. We camped below the ridge in a safe batch of trees. Here we ---------------------------->More

Winter in the Snow; Tenting and Telemarking in the Tetons
By David Noland • LEANING wearily on our ski poles, the three of us stood at the crest of Beard Mountain, a smooth, rolling, 10,500-foot summit in Wyoming's Jedediah Smith Wilderness. My friend Ted Buhl, an accomplished back-country skier, grinned like a madman in anticipation of a dream run: vast expanses of feathery, untracked, knee-deep powder and a brilliant blue sky with the jagged peaks of the Grand Teton Range as a backdrop. Best of all, there was not another human being within miles -- a just reward for the grueling four-hour climb on skis from our camp in the valley below.

I, on the other hand, could manage only a tentative smile. A novice back-country skier, I was a long way from the gentle, packed cross-country ski trails I'd happily shuffled along for years near my Hudson Valley home. I suspected that my usual technique to avoid oncoming trees -- fall down as quickly as possible -- might not suffice here. "Just stay crouched and bounce up and down a little to get a feel for the powder," said our guide, Glenn Vitucci. "You'll be fine."

Perhaps he was right. An expert skier, naturalist and an 11-year veteran of the Teton back country, Glenn had inspired confidence from our first meeting three days earlier----------------------------------> more

A Sawtooth Scene
by Jonah Cantor • There was this one picture that kept appearing on the tabletop throughout the months that I lived at Johnny’s place. A mountain with two summits dominated the 8x10. An impressive hatchet-split feature tore the saw-toothed summit towers in two. To this, Johnny would point and proclaim with reverence, “The Heyburn Couloir.”

It was his dream hatched during an internship two years before hauling sleds, stocking huts and skiing on the clock for Sun Valley Trekking (SVT), a backcountry hut and yurt operation in the Sawtooths and neighboring ranges of Idaho’s Sun Valley. The previous season, while recovering from a serious climbing accident, skiing the Heyburn had become an obsession.------------------------> More

Cowboy Corn - old boys and outlaws take on the Tetons
By Adam Howard • Piloting the land ship at a comfortable 60 miles per hour up the Wilson, Wyoming side of Teton Pass, Peter belts out a few lines of the Ian Tyson country track playing in the tape deck, while his hired man Patrick Gilroy points out some of his winter's skiing exploits on folds of earth south of the road. It's the first week of June and ample late season snow still lays in the shadows and wherever cornices grew big in winter. Both men are just back from a three-week hold up in a tent by extreme cold on Alaska's Denali, and I sense they're ready to cut loose.

  "What's cool about skiing in June," Peter says as he reaches to turn down the volume, "is when you're not skiing you're hanging out in your shorts."   He mashes his sneakered foot on the accelerator to get around a slow moving camper with Missouri plates and with that we crest over the pass and are now plunging toward Idaho.   "Plus," he adds. "With a fast horse you're pretty close to the bar if you need to re-supply." -----------------------------------> More

Chronology of North American Ski Mountaineering and Backcountry Skiing
By Louis Dawson • This chronology is always being improved and updated. Note that the focus here is ski mountaineering and backcountry skiing that involves climbing mountains and skiing down them. While less emphasis is placed on ski traverses, these are considered as well, provided such traverses cover mountain terrain and involve climbs and descents as an integral part of the route (other than ski traverses included for context). One of the most important milestones in this list of events is the first time a particular mountain is skied down from the exact summit or near. While many mountains in North America were explored by people on skis in the early 1900s, the actual event of a person climbing to the top and skiing back down may have occurred at a date later than the first ski exploration. I've attempted to note both events when possible. My picks for the most important ski mountaineering events in North America are marked with a yellow background. -------------------> More

Avalanche - Highland Bowl, Colorado
By Louis Dawson • Aspen, Colorado. For myself and John "Izo" Isaacs, the morning of February 19, 1982 dawned clear, calm and filled with excitement. At 3:30 AM we strapped climbing skins to our skis, and began the long climb via the Highlands Ski Area to the summit of Highlands Peak. We intended to ski Highland Bowl, the stupendous amphitheater formed by the north and south ridges of the peak. Hundreds of avalanches fall here each winter. Most of these grind to a halt on the low angled "flats" midway between the summit and valley. But during heavy winters, monster slides roar almost a vertical mile to the valley floor.
Back in 1982, Highlands Bowl was closed by law to most skiers (it is now part of the ski area's "extreme" terrain). The ski-patrol would take the occasional guided tour, but neither Izo nor I cared to deal with red tape, nor have someone tell us where to ski. ------------------------------------> More

Safety on steep snow - Ice ax, crampons, and self arrest technique
By Lou Dawson • Climbers and skiers die every year from sliding falls on snow. Thus, no discussion of safe snow climbing and steep skiing would be complete without a review of the self arrest -- the time honored method for stopping such falls.
For snow climbers and mountain skiers the self arrest has four forms. These depend on gear. While climbing, you'll need to know how to self arrest with your ice ax. While skiing, you can use specialized self arrest grips on your ski poles. These are less effective than an ice axe, yet skiing while holding an ice ax is dangerous and awkward, so arrest grips can be useful. If you have ski poles, but no arrest grips or ice ax, you can perform a self arrest with your pole tips. This is awkward and ineffective. Lastly, if you have nothing, you can try to arrest with your hands and boot toes. This is bogus -- but good to practice so you know why you need a tool for an effective arrest.------------------------------> More