Call Me In Corbet's

Editor's Note: This beauty was written and photographed by professional ski bum Jon Lang. You can find him working in the Nastar shack at Copper Mountain, Colorado.  

All great days start out with pancakes. Make sure they are homemade too, none of that store bought crap. Momma’s recipe is always a winner. You can throw blueberries in em or whatever you want, but if you really want them to make a great day evolve into an epic one make sure to cook about two pounds of bacon first. And since you’re the chef you get the first batch. Yep, three huge mountain man flapjacks fried in fresh bacon grease. There’s no way you can have a bad day with a start like that.

I had a day like this once. It was spring break of my last year of college as well as my last year in the Powder Brigade aka the Central Oregon Community College Ski Club. You see I like to ski, and I like it even more when it’s free. So two years before this trip I decided to help the newly started and frantically operated ski club, and soon became the President.

After a stellar first year trip to Mt. Baker, Washington, running a Freestyle Ski Team and going to Nationals at Winter Park, Colorado the second year, I decide to go big for the finale. There were members that wanted to go to Tahoe (only just down the road from Central Oregon) but it just didn’t seem that enticing. So I threw out the idea to go to Jackson Hole. The people who had no faith in our club’s ability to raise funds doubted the idea hard, but still put in their non-refundable $20 deposit. It’s amazing how you can convince thirty students to put in $20 deposits and year in year out only ten to twelve of them show up to the annual ski club trip. Life goes on and so does my skiing

Jackson Hole and Grand Targhee it was and a ridonculous lodge in Driggs, Idaho. I got to shake the hand of the builder himself as we moved all our stuff into the rooms. But before that was the trip getting to Wydaho.

I’ll give it to you as short as possible. My roommate Garrett, aka Cattle Guard, (the unofficial club secretary) and I left two weeks before everyone else and more than a week even before finals week. I nearly forgot, before we left that Wednesday morning in early March, 2010 I had to get some freshies on Mt. Bachelor’s Cinder Cone with my boy Joe, and it was his birthday and last day skiing in Oregon with him for probably a really long time. We woke up around 4:30 am and headed up Cascade Lakes Highway to pillage the cone before the sun was even up.

Ok, so we finally left Bend, and two hours later I got my first speeding ticket going 22 over in a 55…typical Oregon coppers. Anyways, we kept heading to Boise as that was our first stop of epicness. There was a Campus Rail Jam Tour stop there at BSU and a friend I wanted to hang out with, so of course we had to spend a few days there. My Jeep decided to break, again, so we spent a few hours in Podunk, Oregon getting it fixed and wasting precious time we could have been skiing for free at Bogus Basin, ID. A few hundred dollars later and the better part of Toy Story 2 and we were back on the road. We got to Boise far later than we wanted to and just crashed for the night.

So as we were trying to get away from Boise and its rampant campus parking tickets my driver-side door decided to fall off. So we had to get the phone book out and call a custom welder and drive all the way over to his house while holding my door on as I drove. He did the job for $30 and we were on the road again, Salt Lake here we come. We crashed at my old neighbor’s house but now they live in Utah. Tacos, some movie I can’t remember and 5 hours of sleep. Up and at em and we were heading to Park City for another free day of skiing. Well, it was raining and we had another eight hours or so to go to get to Summit County, Colorado for more free skiing at Copper Mountain--thanks Powder Corp. We bailed on PC and took the back route  because we wanted to go through Steamboat. It was long, boring and well the only eventful part of it was reading the stupid yellow signs advertising some silly cowboy store for about three hours prior to Steamboat Springs. Oh yeah, I caught Cattle Guard SLEEPING IN THE CAR!! He claims he never does that, looks like I know how to tire people out.

Ten Mile Range from Copper Summit. I'm typing this from here. Seriously, I now work the Nastar shack at Copper.

We stopped and got some bbq sauce for our old roommate Jim Sanco back in Bend and then hit the road. We got to Frisco, CO and crashed with my friend from NZ who’s really from NY but lives in CO. We skied two days at Copper and then headed to Fort Collins for the 71st Annual Western Timber Sports Collegiate Conclave Championships, or something like that.

The axe throwing, wood sawing, caber tossing, chainsaw mauling week was rad. I ended up placing 2nd in the Axe Throw beating not only seventy woodsmen but my own coach/team captain who is a Pro Lumberjack and was one stroke off the PGA last year. The competition was amazing, the school finals I had to take online in the middle of the nights were horrible, but the food at the awards banquet was the best Mexican food I have ever had in my life.

So Garrett and I had a day to kill in between Timber Sports and meeting up with the Ski Club in Jackson Hole so we went down to Denver to visit my aunt and uncle. That blurred by and we were soon on the road to Wyoming. Eleven hours of tundra, windmills and buffalo. I think Garrett fell asleep again but I woke him up when I got the Jeep sideways on I-80 going eighty due to some black ice. It was fine; I practice getting squirly in ski resort parking lots for a reason. We made a pitstop in Rock Springs to fill the ice chests with the food for the week and that took a bit longer than I anticipated but we got back on the road soon enough. Out of the tundra and into the mountains we go, hi ho, hi ho.

We arrived later in the day than I would have liked and the directions to the cabin were, well really vague. Most of the group had made it but birthday boy Joe and Hank the Tank both thought there would be cell service in Eastern Idaho (as I said before we were lodging on the border of Idaho and Wyoming...Wydaho), so they got lost for a few hours. Eventually the club started to worry so I had to fulfill my presidential duties and go find them. I drove around for a bit and somehow managed to see them driving around clueless on the back roads near the cabin. Together we almost got lost again as it was, but somehow found the cabin again.

Wydaho.

The first day we shredded Grand Targhee on the Idaho side of the Tetons. It was a whiteout but we had fun. The skiing was even cheaper for the club budget since we had buy-one-get-one-free tickets from getting gas at Shell stations along the way. What can I say; we’re a bunch of ski bums. That night we had some dank elk burgers that Hank brought, along with Tucker Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. The meat was amazing and the book was atrocious, but both fit the trip.

The cabin was immaculate, hot tub, massive two sided rock fireplace, study, lounge, library, bunk beds, another study…just kidding. But seriously, we got our money’s worth. We cooked up a storm for four days and skied our little hearts out. This is actually where my roommate Garrett got his nickname, Cattle Guard. I’m not sure why, but it was just the best answer anyone could come up with to a question about Garret’s cowboy hat when playing Apples to Apples. I mean, it’s better than Gary.

So now we get to the actual story since the stage is set. Where was I anyways? Oh yeah, pancakes in bacon grease and soaked in syrup. What a great way to start the day!! We headed out super early to get over the Teton Pass (steepest pass in America) because it snowed during the night and we wanted to beat any avalanche controlling on the road. A jeep and two subarus made it full of skis, gear, turkey sammies and twelve college ski bums. Four inches of dry intercontinental powder was on the ground and it was bluebird on the Wyoming side of the Tetons--nailed it!

When we rolled up to the ticket window at Jackson Hole I soon found out the school credit card had a daily maximum on it. The only way the last five skiers were getting on the hill (myself included) was if I fronted my cc and let those hosers put $450 on it…once again, presidential duties. I slapped it down and bit my tongue because the tram was coming back into the bay and we were all ready to schralp some J Hole.

J Hole's 4,000 feet of tram-accessible vert.

Bang bang and we were on the tram, moving steadily up as my stomach steadily dropped. The view was astonishing, not of the surrounding terrain but of the immaculate mansions and pool structures beneath us. So many hot tubs to poach and they’re all ski in ski out. When we got near the top the pools faded and the cliffs and chutes came into view whether you liked it or not; they were everywhere. Full of snow and ready to get gnarly on. The biggest one we passed by people started whispering. “Corbet’s…so huge…you have to be insane to go in there…no way dude, you couldn’t pay me to ski that…”

The tram reached the top and the Ski Club all rallied at the top for some photos. As we started to decide where we were going to ski first everyone started following Eli towards the cliffs we just had a front row view of in the tram. I didn’t like the Buddhist flags looming ahead, that usually means the gnarliest line on the mountain. As we rolled up there was a line of people looking off a cliff. It wasn’t a cliff though, just a straight down ice shelf into a huge couloir surrounded by large cliff walls on both sides. I laughed and asked who was going first and to my surprise some punk piped up. “I have to do this,” said Eli, aka Hans the rowdy 20 year old from Lakeview, OR.

“Are you serious?” I asked with less confidence than before. Eli gave no answer but instead worked his way into the drop zone. The best way to drop it was to ski the vertical snow on the far left (where the shelf was smallest) and then make a huge S curve to the right and then back left down the fall line. Once you did that, everything else was gravy. But if you missed the first bit there was a fun cliff right in front of you to tumble into. And since the Tetons were having a low snow year there was a rock right in the middle of one of the turns so you had to hop over that as well as the rest.

This was the first run of the day and we were doing the gnarliest in-bound terrain possible, and that’s saying something for Jackson Hole. Eli didn’t care about that so he took his drop. Straight down, turn to the right, jump the rock, hard bank left and he made it. Now he had glory turns straight down the chute. Knee deep pow pow and hardly anyone who had been there to touch it. How do I know you ask? Well, once again I had to fulfill my presidential duties and follow suit. I was on center-mounted, reverse-camber powder skis and I soon learned my mistake in taking those skis down Corbet’s Couloir. I edged my way into the drop zone and was now too far in to go back. As I made my initial right hand turn I forgot to take into account the length of my tails due to being center mounted. Since the wall was vertical (and the steepest terrain I have ever turned on) I caught my tails on the wall and got hung up while travelling straight towards that massive cliff wall.

It reminded me of the time I caught my tails on a down-flat-down rail and broke my ribs by landing sideways on the flat part of the rail. I didn’t like that feeling so in a split second I decided to revert back left and make the turn switch. Not by choice, just by circumstance. I skied right over the rock patch and decided I didn’t want to ski the entire couloir switch so I sat her down on my uphill hip. The snow was deeper in the guts and had purchase so I found my breaks. I looked up and realized I had done just about the entire technical part switch and blind; so sketch.

I collected myself and brought my adrenaline level back to zen, then proceeded to ski the easy part. It truly was the best snow I had skied all week, well the whole trip actually. From Oregon, Idaho, Utah (didn’t actually ski the rain snow), Colorado, Idaho again, Wyoming, and Idaho again (after J Hole); none of it compared to Corbet’s. When I got to the bottom where half the club was waiting after skiing around on-piste, I went to pull out my cell phone to call my brother and the rest of the club. The one day I put my phone in my side pocket is the one day I forget to do a zipper check. The phone wasn’t there and I was not too stoked. The good part is that the phone is water, freeze and crush proof but I was not going to repeat that fiasco again to retrieve it. I offered my phone to Corbet’s as a sacrifice for my life and I am happy with that. If you ever have the balls to ski Corbet’s Couloir at Jackson Hole and you hear something ringing don’t stop, just keep skiing or you might trade your life for my sacrifice.

So tired.

The trip went on but everyone went separate ways. Joe backtracked Garrett and my tracks and headed to Colorado. Some went straight back to Bend, a few others went north to Sandpoint, ID to ski Schweitzer and get raped by the local police, but Hank switched out of Joe’s and into my rig to finish the Tucker Max stories. About a mile before the turnoff to go to Schweitzer the three of us decided to extend our ridiculous March madness and exploit beautiful Northern Idaho. The trip in a whole was the true meaning of the word epic; nothing less. A week after getting back to Bend I wrote a letter explaining why I was speeding and that I stayed below the limit the next three weeks. You guessed it; the judge dropped the ticket completely.