Opening Day — Hogsback

Opening Day

October 26th. The first real snow of the season hit Baker overnight and my human had the car loaded before dawn. Opening day isn't about conditions or timing or even good snow. It's about being first. First tracks of the season. First powder turns. First time the splitboard touches snow since spring.

We drove up to the ski area in the storm — wipers going, snow piling on the road, the mountain invisible above us. The parking lot was white and empty. Nobody else was dumb enough to be here.

We skinned up from the ski area at 3,700 feet. The snow was falling hard enough to fill our tracks behind us. The forest was heavy and wet, every branch drooping, the air thick with flakes the size of quarters. A creek ran through the approach — dark water cutting through snow-covered boulders, the sound of it muffled by the storm.

The Hogsback

Above the ski area boundary the terrain opened up into the Hogsback — a broad ridge climbing north toward Baker's upper flanks. In summer it's meadows and heather. In October, under two feet of fresh snow with more falling, it was featureless white.

The whiteout was total above treeline. Sky and snow merged into a single plane of grey-white nothing. No horizon, no shadows, no depth. Just snow falling into snow. I navigated by smell and by the angle of the slope under my paws. My human navigated by GPS and stubbornness.

At 6,200 feet we called it. The wind was building, the visibility was maybe twenty feet, and the snow was falling at two inches an hour. I was coated — my pack, my fur, my face, everything crusted with a layer of fresh snow that made me look like a different dog. A white dog.

I didn't care about the whiteout. I was standing in snow for the first time since April. My tail was going. Obviously.

The Descent

My human ripped skins and we pointed it downhill. Forty-eight hundred vertical feet of storm powder, from the Hogsback all the way down to the valley floor — well below where we'd started.

The upper section was blind. No visual reference at all — just the feeling of the board in the snow and the sound of powder spraying and the occasional rock that appeared and disappeared in the fog. My human rode cautiously. I ran flat out. We have different risk tolerances.

Below treeline the visibility improved and the snow got heavier — October powder at Baker, dense and wet and bottomless. The forest was a tunnel of white, every tree loaded, snow falling from branches onto snow falling from the sky. I broke trail through powder that came up to my chest and didn't slow down once in eleven miles.

We exited at the bottom of the valley, nearly two thousand feet below where we'd parked. The car was somewhere above us on the mountain, buried under six hours of continuous snowfall.

First tracks of the season. In a storm, on Baker, in October. Not glamorous. Not bluebird. Not Instagram-worthy. Just a dog and her human in a whiteout, doing the thing we'd been waiting six months to do again.

Season: open.