Photo by: Matthew Bunker
Location: Near the top of Crystal Mountain during the 2019 skimo race
Location: Near the top of Crystal Mountain during the 2019 skimo race
Allen Taylor
I love to ski. Ever since I was a child it's been about all I ever really wanted to do. I started skiing with an after-school program in my rural hometown of Holderness NH. At age 16 I joined the national Ski Patrol and spent several years Ski Patrolling at Tenney mountain in Plymouth New Hampshire. There, some of my older colleagues revealed the world of tree skiing to me and I have been hooked ever since. Late in High school my friend Ben Peters encouraged me to take up backcountry skiing. I attended the University of Vermont and if I had spent as much time studying as I did skiing I would probably have gotten really good grades. I started to explore ski mountaineering in the Green and White Mountains.
After college at the urging of my best friend Sam Lozier I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Living near Mt. Baker my love for Ski Mountaineering blossomed. At the same time I had begun a physically demanding career as an arborist and I found that my endurance and speed were rapidly improving. About five years ago I read both "Born to Run" and "Training for the New Alpinism" two books which would affect me deeply. In addition to my steep skiing exploits I was starting to discover light skimo racing gear and the nascent PNW skimo race scene. Enjoying both aspects of backcountry skiing I started to combine them into fast and light backcountry missions.
Over the past few years I have enjoyed a great deal of success (and more recently failure as the kids keep getting faster.. or is it I who is getting slower?) in both local skimo racing, fast and light backcountry missions including a few probable FKT's, and even the occasional steep skiing objective. I hope to share a few of the techniques that allowed me to succeed to help others achieve their goals.
I have been meaning to compile my experiences into a single source for some time now. I have benefitted from many such resources in the past and I hope to pass it along to others now. The routes and information contained herein are just my experiences and are based on photos, gps routes, and my memory, all of which are imperfect. I hope to aid others in safely discovering the amazing world of ski mountaineering in its many forms. Nothing I post here is intended to demean any other form of skiing or sport. It is simply the way I find flow state in the mountains.
I hope to not offend too many people by posting GPS tracks. I don't think I'm ruining anyone's stashes as everything in here will be a significant undertaking. Most of the routes here are also easily found in books or on the internet. My goal was to compile route info into a single source that is typically found across multiple sources. I hope people use the GPS tracks as a resource to supplement their own planning and research and not as their sole navigational aid. I have been helped by many folks who have shared their tracks with me in the past.
I have found that living a very busy and hectic life it has been helpful to go into a trip with as much info as possible. I understand the call of adventure that comes with going into the unknown, figuring out the route as you go, or with minimal beta. Hell, do it all by map and compass to be an old school badass, I don't care! These are the roots of our sport. My main issue with that approach is that it skews heavily towards people who have lots of free time. I have worked full time for the past 10 years including my own company, now I work much more than full time. With the limited and precious free time that I have my goal is to safely succeed in the mountains. I think that there are many others who share this approach.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is a special kind of adventure that comes from venturing into the unknown. The Cascades are huge and I am convinced that there will always be plenty of terrain left to explore. If you feel that your experience of a route might be ruined by the GPS tracks and descriptions on this site you can choose to not look at them.
There is no doubt that Lowell Skoog's Alpenglow.org website was a huge inspiration for this site. Thanks Lowell!
After college at the urging of my best friend Sam Lozier I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Living near Mt. Baker my love for Ski Mountaineering blossomed. At the same time I had begun a physically demanding career as an arborist and I found that my endurance and speed were rapidly improving. About five years ago I read both "Born to Run" and "Training for the New Alpinism" two books which would affect me deeply. In addition to my steep skiing exploits I was starting to discover light skimo racing gear and the nascent PNW skimo race scene. Enjoying both aspects of backcountry skiing I started to combine them into fast and light backcountry missions.
Over the past few years I have enjoyed a great deal of success (and more recently failure as the kids keep getting faster.. or is it I who is getting slower?) in both local skimo racing, fast and light backcountry missions including a few probable FKT's, and even the occasional steep skiing objective. I hope to share a few of the techniques that allowed me to succeed to help others achieve their goals.
I have been meaning to compile my experiences into a single source for some time now. I have benefitted from many such resources in the past and I hope to pass it along to others now. The routes and information contained herein are just my experiences and are based on photos, gps routes, and my memory, all of which are imperfect. I hope to aid others in safely discovering the amazing world of ski mountaineering in its many forms. Nothing I post here is intended to demean any other form of skiing or sport. It is simply the way I find flow state in the mountains.
I hope to not offend too many people by posting GPS tracks. I don't think I'm ruining anyone's stashes as everything in here will be a significant undertaking. Most of the routes here are also easily found in books or on the internet. My goal was to compile route info into a single source that is typically found across multiple sources. I hope people use the GPS tracks as a resource to supplement their own planning and research and not as their sole navigational aid. I have been helped by many folks who have shared their tracks with me in the past.
I have found that living a very busy and hectic life it has been helpful to go into a trip with as much info as possible. I understand the call of adventure that comes with going into the unknown, figuring out the route as you go, or with minimal beta. Hell, do it all by map and compass to be an old school badass, I don't care! These are the roots of our sport. My main issue with that approach is that it skews heavily towards people who have lots of free time. I have worked full time for the past 10 years including my own company, now I work much more than full time. With the limited and precious free time that I have my goal is to safely succeed in the mountains. I think that there are many others who share this approach.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is a special kind of adventure that comes from venturing into the unknown. The Cascades are huge and I am convinced that there will always be plenty of terrain left to explore. If you feel that your experience of a route might be ruined by the GPS tracks and descriptions on this site you can choose to not look at them.
There is no doubt that Lowell Skoog's Alpenglow.org website was a huge inspiration for this site. Thanks Lowell!
