Matt Ruta 
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Whoops, this draft has been sitting around collecting dust for nearly an entire year. (I’ll backdate it so anyone referring to it for beta doesn’t get confused by the time of year we skied the line.) It was a wonderful day skiing a route you won’t find much information about, so I think it’s still worth publishing. For various reasons, spring 2023 didn’t line up all that well for me. I spent… Read More
I’ll go ahead and call it – the northwest couloir on Mt. Burgess should be a classic. (In fact, both couloirs on this peak should.) It overlooks and is visible from an iconic location, it’s steep, it’s technical and it feels wild. Joel had skied the line once before, but Chris and I were experiencing it for the first time when we set off from Emerald Lake Lodge on a claggy New… Read More
I’m a sucker for an interesting bit of mountain history. Both fortunately and unfortunately, here in the Rockies, much of the history of even the most famous ski descents has gone unrecorded. But, when it does turn up it’s often presented in a wonderfully elusive, fragmented way. A forum post here, an aside in a climbing guidebook there, maybe a blog post or two if you’re really lucky. It’s modern folklore of… Read More
In my last post, I mentioned a little mission of mine: to ski every major line on the north face of Mt. Macdonald in Rogers Pass. After skiing the number 10/11 couloir the week previous, I had only a handful left – the most interesting being the number five couloir. With good stability still hanging on and Valerio and Ryan joining to form a strong crew, it should go without saying that… Read More
The north face of Mount Macdonald is a special place. To say it towers above the highway east of the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre would be an understatement. That its dark, forbidding rampart is split by not just one, but a handful of world class couloirs never ceases to amaze me, and I’ve been on a mission to ski my way through them for years.
Finally, another exploratory mission. On the 28th, a spring temperature cycle was a little more locked in, but the weather remaining unsettled. It looked like a good time to check out a line I’ve been staring at from the highway near Field for years: the north facing couloir on Mt. Dennis.
Grand Daddy couloir on Bow Peak – what a classic line. On April 19th a group of friends and I got chased off of it before we even had our boots on when the cannon sound of cornice fall scared the bejeezus out of us in the Mosquito Creek parking lot. That was a Wednesday, and we all had a very early lunch just above treeline while things fell down around the… Read More
Matt Ruta 