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Powder to the people - Two Missoula ski companies– Montana Snowcat Club and Yurtski– open the backcountry to business.

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December 1, 2003

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Montana Snowcat Club http://www.montanasnowcatclub.com/

A perfect storm rages outside, but all is calm inside the Mothership. The ’Ship, a 14-foot-wide Piston Bully snowcat, is a ski bum’s powder dream—with an overpowered sound system and seating for 15, it’s the only sensible way to carry a party of skiers high into backcountry heaven.

by Chad Harder The Missoula Independent

This morning is a “blower,” a term used by the Montana Snowcat Club (MSC) to describe wind-whipped powder days when scouring snowflakes obscure a purple-gray dawn atop the infamous Wisherd Ridge high in the Rattlesnake Range.

Punching through an endless procession of drifts, the cat tracks are at once covered by the storm raging outside. The mobile shelter, however, houses a dozen begoggled skiers riding anxiously inside the ’Ship’s cabin and experiencing another kind of “blower”—a blast furnace that belies the inhospitable sub-zero world outside.

By 8 a.m., the weak winter sun is breaking through with just enough light for a dedicated group of adrenaline junkies, businessmen and university students to start choosing the coveted lines they’ve paid $150 to ski from dawn to dusk. The jostling, 12-mile ride reminds occupants of the coffee they’ve been downing, but it’s the view out the window that causes some to nearly wet their pants.

Through the trees, skiers are getting views of steep—very steep—bowls. But that’s what we’ve come for—easy-access backcountry with a steadier stream of faceshots than a night of boxing at the Wilma.

The hosts, two young ski entrepreneurs with more than two decades of backcountry skiing experience across the West, have painstakingly assessed the day’s clients—the clothes on their back, the way they perform their transceiver searches, everything they do, everything they say. Much is riding on the line.

Co-owner Nick Trimble, a confident 32-year-old Colorado transplant with a firm handshake and a history of going big (he once broke his back at Big Mountain), has been up four hours preparing for his clients.

“You’re like a farmer,” he says. “You’re up at 4 a.m., stressed out as hell. You’re greasing up the cat, wondering if the machine’s gonna start and wondering if the clients are gonna be late,” he says. But an hour after boarding the Mothership, the skiers are left standing at the top, watching the cat grind out of sight, nothing but untracked lines of Montana powder stretched out before them. It’s time to go to work.

Clients grab their shovels and jump in with club “officers” to dig snow pits, inspecting hidden layers and determining which aspects to ski. While some come looking for extreme, 50-degree lines, that’s not the focus of MSC’s business. Similarly, novice skiers are not welcome.

We’re not an extreme team,” says Trimble, “but we’re not beginner, and we’re not even intermediate. We hold the philosophy that you shouldn’t be up there unless you know what you’re doing. We’re not really geared towards families, we’re geared towards skiers.” Skiers, that is, with confidence, competence and an awareness of their limits.

Trimble is willing to admit that Wisherd has “a lot of sick terrain,” but he’s hesitant to talk slope angles. “If people hear the word ‘extreme,’ that’s what they’ll come for. And more people will be dying.”

He’s probably right. In January of 2002, 10 snowmobilers were riding on the north end of Wisherd in an area known as “Bowl Five.” It’s a favorite spot for highmarking snowmobilers, but regularly avoided by skiers due to the serious slide danger created by heavy motorized use. Apparently unaware of an unstable layer deep in the snowpack, the sledders triggered an avalanche that killed four men, burying them in as much as 20 feet of snow. The accident stands as Montana’s deadliest backcountry mishap to date.

Accidents are something MCS works hard to avoid, hiring an EMT to ski with every trip and certified “officers” to guide clients through the maze of chutes, trees and clearcuts radiating from the ridge. Some officers are high-profile ski industry lifers who moonlight for MSC when not guiding for the American Alpine Institute or Chugach Powder Guides, two of the most respected backcountry guiding services in the world.

But word of Wisherd’s potential inevitably gets around, and clients regularly show up ready to push the envelope. When that happens, MSC doesn’t hesitate to shut them down, even if the guests are professional riders on shooting assignments from, say, the leading ski publication in the world.

“The Powder Magazine guys wanted to do lots of stuff that we wouldn’t let them do,” says Trimble. The publication’s visit last February scored MSC a full spread in the October issue of the long-running glossy, and sent the company’s website ticker into overdrive. But greater challenges face these professional dream-providers than master skiers looking to huck big gaps.

Previous clients on the decidedly amateur end of the spectrum have inflated their backcountry credentials on the mandatory pre-ski questionaire, putting themselves, and the entire operation, at risk.

“Those people are off the mountain, they’re done,” says 30-year-old co-owner Ed Kleiman, a 12-year Montana backcountry veteran whose 20 acres near the Blackfoot River acts as the down-low MSC base camp. “They’ll sit in the cat for the rest of the day.”

There are, of course, worse ways to spend your day than kicking back inside a mobile speaker box with a 360-degree panorama of prime Montana backcountry, but it hardly compares with making countless turns through untracked bowls and perfectly spaced trees while a toasty warm snowcat chugs around to pick you up for lap after lap of ecstatic powder runs.

Although much has been made of a long-running drought that has kept on-area freshies a coveted commodity for the past six years, MSC runs only when the snow is good.

“People are regularly having their best day ever up here,” says Kleiman. “They want us to go into town and rejoice with them over dinner and drinks.”

“Yeah, you know you’re satisfying them, and you know you’ve got a good product,” adds Trimble. “Everyone who goes with us comes back.”

If you think MSC’s business is all powder glades and happy skiers, think again. Any ski operation is weather-dependent, and although the company didn’t start its season until February 10 last year, even a good year sees MSC in action only from Christmas to March. Add a harsh and/or unstable operating environment to a client base that’s inclined to overstate its qualifications and the potential for disaster is very real. Even the equipment that makes the business possible—persnickety, highly-specialized German snowcats—requires 10 minutes of maintenance for every 60 minutes of operation, a ratio comparable to that of helicopters.

MSC owns four of the Piston Bully snowcats, scalping parts off the unused machines as breakdowns dictate. Providing skiers with access to remote terrain, the diesel machines are both loved and hated by the ski community, a demographic known for green tendencies. MSC is attempting to capitalize on those leanings, turning to Montana Biodiesel for a fuel blend composed of part petroleum, part fryer grease. The fledgling fuel lacks the frigid-temperature performance to operate the cat, and for now it’s used solely in the shop heaters, though the cost is nearly three times that of straight petroleum.

Until the company can make a full transition to biofuel, MSC will remain rather unique in its use of heavy, polluting machinery to provide typically green-thinking skiers with backcountry opportunities.

Unlike most tourism-based industries, which utilize Montana’s least impacted natural resources, it is precisely the cuts and access roads built to extract timber that allow MSC a place to run its business. MSC may be just the first of many to see a use for these cutover lands. Because of the access provided by timber company impacts, untracked terrain once seen only in ski movies and magazines is now available to anyone with $150.

The irony is not lost on Kleiman, a seven-year Forest Service veteran who has worked in fire fighting, hydraulics and mechanics.

“Cat skiing is this funny bridge between the old industry and the new,” Kleiman says.

“Montana has to make the shift here economically towards sustainable resources that bring in money,” he says. “There’s not a lot of money here, but there’s always people who want to recreate and go skiing and spend their money. We have a chance to use lands sustainably that are otherwise environmentally destroyed.”

Private owners’ willingness to permit recreational use is the only way MSC’s business model could work, as the environmental regulations protecting public land would require environmental impact statements, which for MSC would prove cost-prohibitive.

“The cold hard truth is that nobody’s running a cat-skiing operation on public land,” says Trimble. “Road closures, lynx, and sweeping [environmental] policies prevent anything new from happening.”

And so MSC uses land owned entirely by Plum Creek, which until this year has given MSC a free recreational use “club” permit. But impressive growth has driven the skiers to restructure the business from a club to a corporation, a status that’s inspired the timber company to charge for a permit this year. As of press time, Plum Creek had not disclosed the cost of the permit, although they charge a business running cats on Snoqualmie Pass $1,000 for a similar one. While that might be pocket change for a mega-corp with holdings of nearly eight million acres in 19 states, it does indicate an untapped economic potential for cutover lands.

“[We] give Plum Creek a chance to bring in something to their land to replace the value of the real estate, or the timber,” says Kleiman. “Our little check doesn’t mean much, but business is making money, and that turns the wheel.”

And the wheel needs turning, and greasing, and an endless amount of early-morning maintenance. Although a sizeable amount of money seems to flow into MSC’s coffers, the realities of maintaining finicky high-performance equipment with heavy loads in a decidedly inhospitable environment have prevented (so far, at least) Trimble and Kleiman from getting rich. Instead they’ve been getting more reliable, more efficient, and this year, more cats. But both insist that the necessities of running a barely-sustainable business have not torn them from their club roots of doing whatever it takes to get the “Bros” on the hill.

The first couple years of operation, lucky friends could occasionally jump in the cat for gas money, says Trimble. “Because you know what? We’re going skiing every day, either on the sleds or in the cat. That’s how it started, and we really don’t want to [end] that.” More than anything, MSC’s fabled “Bro Days” are just low-stress days short of paying clients on which Trimble and Kleiman get to ski with their friends. Obviously, no snowcat club will ever find itself with a shortage of qualified Bros, ready and willing to “help out,” and MSC isn’t afraid to exploit the talent provided by those drawn to the homeboy aspect of the club.

“We’ve got all kinds of arrangements,” laughs Trimble, who swaps cat rides with friends who provide design work, photography and endless labor (he estimates that he and Kleiman count “80 Missoula friends who are addicted skiers”).

But for all their friends, a commercial cat ski operation located a jump turn from Missoula could not operate without detractors. Recently, one angry caller left a message falsely accusing MSC of operating on Forest Service land without a permit. Although the Forest Service doesn’t regulate the use of private land, the call was representative of a long-standing debate within Missoula’s backcountry community about the steady increase of motorized use on Wisherd Ridge, long one of Missoula’s best known backcountry ski destinations. Many skiers remember a Wisherd scene before 1998, when Plum Creek locked an access gate far from the ridge.

Before the closure, burly 4x4s could get within an hour’s push of “Suzie Bowl,” which provides the closest and most moderate high-country routes up there. But with the increased distance now required to access it—the approach from the gate is now 12 miles—anyone hoping to ski Wisherd will have to cover 24 miles of heavily used logging roads to get in and out. Now, the snowcat essentially grooms the deeply-drifted upper part of the road, providing strong skiers and many snowmobilers with easier access to the high lines. But complaints continue, and that annoys Trimble, a ridge veteran since 1989.

“Anyone who gripes about [cats on the ridge] takes for granted the plowed roads and doesn’t know the history of it,” he says. “The roads drift in so completely up high that unless you have a really high-powered snowmobile,” winter users would be hard pressed to push that high.

With their entire bank accounts dumped into a weather-dependent, three-months-a-year business, MSC has turned to numerous off-season opportunities to fund their winter addiction. When they stop running cats from their Twin Creeks shop around the end of March, they load them up and head to Beartooth Pass to construct ramps and haul skiers at the All-Star Ski Camp. Although the cat services are presently donated, Trimble sees great potential.

“Once you get into snowcats, you realize that the money’s not even really in skiing, the money’s in the snowmobile grooming, the service of cats, the site maintenance, the service and repair of snowcats,” he says. “Our extracurricular is where we see the money.”

The camp employs skiing superstars like Glenn Plake, Missoula homeboy and former world mogul champion Donovan Power and Whitefish’s own Tanner Hall to coach at the high-altitude camp through early June. MSC was summoned to shuttle skiers after an overzealous dynamite-tosser on avalanche patrol blasted a cornice that raced down a face and cut a lift tower in half just 15 days before the camp’s scheduled opening. Now, two years later, MSC and the camp work in tandem to construct the massive 70-foot ramps, tabletops and meticulously manicured features required to keep professional gap jumpers happy.

Come summer, MSC goes to work as a contract wildland fire-fighting team, a field in which both worked before committing to cat skiing .

“It’s nice to run a ski-related business that isn’t based on all the modern marketing of ‘ego’ and ‘The Best!,’” says Trimble. “Snowcat skiing is very slow, and very relaxed. It’s about getting the best and most snow in your face that you can get.”

Yurtski http://www.yurtski.com/

While the Snowcat Club’s rock ’n’ roll Mothership backs slowly into its nighttime parking spot inside the MSC shed, a thin plume of wood smoke rises from a smokestack deep in the Swan Mountain Range. Inside, a posse of wind-burned and exhausted backcountry skiers drink boxes o’ wine and cook smoked salmon and mushroom alfredo on a three-burner beneath soggy socks drying above the wood stove.

Outside, a howling wind plasters deep drifts across the skin tracks that earlier led the group to the snow-covered yurt, a circular wall tent that sleeps eight in traditional Mongolian style. Today, the yurt is home to a group of friends who will crash soundly beneath its sagging, snow-covered roof between days of skiing the steeps, glades and bowls towering above.

Although backcountry shelters dot the high mountains of Europe, Canada, and a few American states—providing backcountry travelers with inexpensive, cozy places to escape the elements, cook up meals and dry out gear—they’re rare in Montana.

Yurtski is the brainchild of Missoula homies Brice Jones and Charles Savoia, two long-time fire fighters/ski junkies with a vision of giving Montana’s backcountry addicts a basecamp from which to ski, ride and otherwise enjoy a slice of Montana’s remote high country. Both ski more than 100 days per year.

“I always wanted to be in the ski industry, but I wanted to do something different,” says Jones. Although he was ski bumming at Alta Ski Area in Utah’s snowtorious Wasatch Range in 2000, he felt anxious to return to his native Montana, and to be his own boss.

Later that year, while on a break from fighting fire (a summertime job that still provides both with the bulk of their incomes) the fellow Missoula Hotshots committed to starting a backcountry ski business with a handshake over beers at a Wyoming bar.

The next steps were to secure a location and a small business loan—both endeavors infamous for bureaucracy—via the National Forest Service and a bank, respectively. Their locale of choice was a bowl high in the Flathead Mountains between Essex and Whitefish, but without a federally-mandated, pre-established lynx monitoring program, they would be required to fund one themselves—to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

So they headed south to the Lolo National Forest, where Jones had spent years building trail. A five-year lynx study there was already established, and all signs pointed to an opportune fit.

“They were excited about bringing a new business to the area,” says Jones, so that winter the two jumped on their snowmobiles and headed up old logging roads into the high country above Salmon Lake to a rarely visited basin beneath Merrell Mountain.

“We took five trips that winter, camping out and skiing many, many days to get to know the terrain,” says Jones. A five-hour ski from the car, they found a flat spot perfect for the yurt, surrounded by clearcuts and skiable lines. The location was approved and they headed to the bank.

“We had good luck with the bank—once we got them to figure out what we were trying to do,” says the 31-year-old Jones. After showing the loan officer other yurt skiing websites, their loan was approved.

There are many yurts on the market, but the harsh conditions of this windswept setting required them to spend more than $5,000, which included an upgraded “snowload kit,” a heavily-reinforced package with 2-inch by 6-inch rafters.

“It’s got to handle being smunched by 10 feet of snow, like we had last year,” Jones explains.

Like so many out-of-the-way ski stashes that powderhounds refuse to share with just anyone, the basin south of Merrell Mountain gets its fair share of snow. Last year, for instance, this writer experienced a storm that dropped two feet in 18 hours, after which the temperature dropped off, the snow dried out and the sun blazed for a fabled day fit for powder-skiing lore.

So while Montana’s low-elevation hills like Marshall Mountain shutter their operations, and other resorts fret about snowmaking capacities, the blessed topography of the yurt’s surrounding bowls catches moisture-laden clouds, wringing copious amounts of the white glory onto its slopes, even in these years of extreme drought.

“Nobody’s ever said it was tracked out,” says Jones.

With permits and loans secured, the duo turned to marketing, hoping to entice skiers, snowboarders, cross-country skiers and winter recreationists of any ability in hopes of paying off their investment as quickly as possible. That plan backfired.

“I guess we didn’t have the marketing down right,” says Jones. “We had some cross-country skiers who stayed up there who came out saying, ‘That’s not cross-country terrain up there! It’s the worst cross-country skiing!’ Going down that hill with a 60-pound pack on little skinny skis with no edges would be death-defying—but we didn’t know that because we didn’t cross-country ski!”

And so they learned. The second year, the duo was able to move the yurt to an even better location, further up the bowl and right in the middle of a glade skier’s paradise.

“We got our marketing down, and people knew what to expect,” says Jones. Instead of trying to appeal to all, the literature now informs guests that they need to be at least intermediate skiers with route-finding skills. If guests lack backcountry experience, they are told to hire a guide and come prepared for a 4-to-5-hour slog to the yurt.

Guests are told that backcountry skiing poses inherent risks, including injury and death. They are asked to come prepared for avalanches, and to bring their own transceivers, probes and shovels. And to expect to burn and consume a whole lot of calories. Apparently, clients paid attention.

“Basically, 99 percent were really excited about the experience (last year), up from about 60 percent the year before,” he says.

The yurt sits about a mile from the 8,100-foot Merrell Mountain, a prominent yet hidden-from-the-highway summit one half-mile from the confluence of the Scapegoat and Bob Marshall Wildernesses. Although the skiable lines are virtually limitless, the best have been named, with monikers like “Pleasure Cruise,” “Breakfast Bowl” and “Burnt Bowl” etched across the three-dimensional topographic maps left at the cabin for late-night drool sessions.

“The terrain is really unlimited—the stronger you are, the farther you can go,” Jones says. The wrap-round, all-aspects nature of the basin means that even with the variables of snowpack, weather and client ability, untracked lines can always be found, from the 1,600-foot straight shots directly down from Merrell’s summit to shorter shots right out the yurt’s front door. The nearby runs can be yoyo-ed all day long with a minimum of cardiovascular output—and without ever crossing your own tracks.

The yurt attracts recreationists of all persuasions—snowmobile tourists, telemark skiers, snowboarders and skiers who use snowmobiles for the approach—who want multiple days in the backcountry, but without the added challenge of winter camping.

To meet the needs of a wide range of users, Jones and Savoia offer three styles of trip: self-service, guided and catered. The self-service option provides experienced backcountry lowbaggers with a warm basecamp from which to explore the winter world, providing their own food and route-finding skills. Whether clients choose to approach on skis, snowshoes or snowmobile, the package runs $15 per person per night on weekdays, and $25 per night on weekends.

Backcountry novices can also pay one of Yurtski’s certified guides 100 bones for guidance to prime powder stashes. If you prefer après-ski company, they’ll stick around; otherwise they’ll ski out, leaving you and yours alone for the night.

A catered option is geared toward groups seeking a more pampered experience. For $75–$90 per night, depending on the size of your group, a certified guide will stoke the fire, lead the way to powder lines and cook meals.

Folks can ski in the eight miles, or pay $20 for a snowmobile tow, but expect to be blasted by a relentless stream of snow as the machine works at the threshold of its capacity. If a storm should roll in during the approach, the tow assures that parties will indeed locate the yurt, even in whiteout conditions, and also allows more time to explore the high basin. But for many, the benefits of Montana’s winter backcountry lie in escaping mechanical, polluting modernities, including the belch and whine of snowmobiles.

Folks of this persuasion appreciate the entirety of the human-powered experience, ready to leave the parking lot on skis with a heavy pack instead of taking the easier tow up. But for the overzealous, ill-prepared or topo-ignorant, locating the yurt in an impressive sea of bowls, ridges and clearcuts on the edge of the largest roadless area in the Lower 48 can be a tricky—and risky—business. To prevent route-finding confusion, Yurtski provides a $40 “hosting service” that guides prospects to the yurt, introduces them to the facilities and then heads out, leaving the happy campers in the peace and quiet of the remote alpine hut.

Regardless of the method of approach, clients hiring the services of Yurtski tend to be single-minded: They want untracked powder turns, and lots of them. Guests represent a wide spectrum, but typical is a backcountry veteran with an intimate awareness of what he wants from the experience, and the motivation to make it happen.

“The average [client] is a mid-40-year-old who’s been backcountry skiing for 10 to 20 years, with stashes in various locations across the West and Canada, with plans for at least a couple trips every winter,” says Jones. “They know the system, they know the yurts and they’re dialed. They bring pies to bake, a box of wine. They’re living the cush life up there.”

Yet there’s an exception to every rule. “One group didn’t even ski,” Jones says. “It was a guy’s birthday, and five or six folks had the place for five days. They brought in a 16-gallon keg and were way into extreme [inner]tubing.”

Such relatively affordable options provide increased access for average Joes—perhaps snowblinded by a blizzard of magazines and movies glamorizing the backcountry experience—to put themselves in positions of risk and reward with higher stakes than their daily lives, a point not lost on Yurtski. Although the deadly seriousness of self-sufficiency and safety is hammered home to all clients, the inherent challenge of performing a rescue in such a remote location keeps the owners concerned. Since the yurt lies within cell phone range, guests are encouraged to call Yurtski directly when minor problems arise; medivac helicopters will fly out of Missoula straight away if a true emergency calls for it.

One real danger to skiers is the presence of other backcountry users, in particular high-marking snowmobilers who can be oblivious to the small swath cut by down-low skiers. In unstable conditions, skiers can find themselves in dangerous situations, so Jones and Savoia work hard to maintain an open relationship with the snowmobile clubs that tour the nearby area. Although the area Yurtski uses is off limits to motorized vehicles, the restricted powder bowls are tempting to snowmobilers, who occasionally (and illegally) head into the roadless bowl, invariably without penalty.

“It’s nearly impossible for the Forest Service to catch them,” says Jones, who tries to guide his clients to untracked areas whenever possible.

“We don’t want to alienate ourselves from the locals, but it can be dangerous for skiers when snowmobiles are in the area,” he says.

“We just try to find common ground and use different areas.”

But snowmobile tourists aren’t the only neighbors Yurtski contends with. The yurt lies in prime habitat for both grizzly bears and lynx. Forest Service biologists limit Yurtski’s season to December through March, when bears are hibernating, to prevent them from becoming accustomed to the yurt and its occupants.

Missoula’s backcountry skiers have numerous accessible places to ski, and popular areas like Lolo Pass and Hoodoo Pass are constantly evolving in their proportion of unmotorized ski use to snowmobile use. With the popularity of backcountry sports soaring, the challenge of balancing solitude with baditude becomes all the more important.

“We don’t want [the] area to become overused like either of those passes,” says Jones. “Part of the romanticism of the place is that you’re up there by yourself. I mean there’s a trapper that comes through, and occasionally snowmobile tourists use the road, but other than that you’re all alone.”

The long slog prevents everyone but snowmobilers and dedicated skiers from scoring freshies within hucking distance of the yurt, but industry trends indicate that more and more people are looking deeper and deeper into the hills for their kicks. Yurtski is more than happy with that prospect.

“Hopefully someday we’ll have a hut to hut system,” says Savoia.

“That way people can travel in the Swans in the winter and still have a warm place to sleep.”

And really, what more could a ski junkie hope for? There are more than a dozen ski areas in the state, and near-endless options for anyone willing to hike for their turns. With the additional options provided by Yurtski and the Montana Snowcat Club, more and more of Montana’s ski junkies can score their untracked powder lines with far less work, a fact of which Jones is proud.

“We’re not trying to juice people,” says Jones. “We just want people to get to have the same kind of experience that we center our life around.”

http://www.missoulanews.com/News/News.asp?no=3690

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