SierraDescents

Gazing upon California’s rugged central coast from Highway 1 for the very first time this past week, my immediate thought was: I am a bad Californian.

The great Al Preston and I took a short break from the chairlifts last weekend to ski Hollywood Chute, the modest but aesthetic diagonal cut through the Mammoth Crest headwall over McLeod Lake.

“It’s an angular/rotational leap rather than a vertical one” is my best 2026 compression for understanding both classic and modern Pedal-Hop steep skiing technique.

Typically, when we get to the top of a mountain, we are excited at the prospect of skiing down.

Looking back at my records, I see the last time I visited San Gorgonio was May 2020, which means it took me exactly six years to forget how awful the approach is.

The vibe at Mammoth has been a little off this year—so I’ve heard, and so it seems to me from my few visits.

As you might expect there are a lot of ‘silver’ mountains in Colorado, but for our purposes this is 13,470′ Silver Mountain (aka Silver B) that towers over Ophir, and forms the massif that includes Telluride’s Palmyra Peak.

Don’t tell the San Gabriels, but wow is it easy to get stunning video in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains—you can just point your camera in any direction and the range pretty much does the rest.

The pain woke me at one a.m. and I knew immediately there was no way I was going back to sleep.

In so many ways, it is hard to keep up with the pace of change right now.