Silverton Mountain, Colorado
by Ryan on January 26, 2010
A few of our Colorado friends recently took a trip out the Silverton and it was nothing short of amazing…and I wasn’t even there! Read on for full write up courtesy of Nick Wojdak, thanks!
To say Silverton Mountain is epic is an understatement. Silverton can only be described as heaven on earth for snowboarders. Our trip was perfect but so close to not happening. The San Juan Mountains got hammered with up to 75” of Colorado light fresh powder over 4-5 days. We decided to go down to just Wolf Creek at first, but with a little discussion it was a no brainer to do Wolf Creek Saturday and Silverton Sunday. Saturday was great at Wolf Creek but the whole day we were concerned that the west side of the pass wasn’t going to open. Luckily after an epic day of riding we the pass opened.
White knuckle driving down the “gnarly” west side of Wolf Creek pass
Oh so that’s why it was closed… Huge avalanche that had just been cleaned up.
Made it to Durango alive and it was bluebird.
Snowblower on the pass to Silverton (which also opened just a matter of hours before we needed to get over it)
The median in Silverton… shit was 10+ feet tall.
We rolled into Silverton around 7pm, with nowhere to stay, we found a small little motel called the Triangle Motel. Its nothing special, the shower would easily leave you with skin burns, but it was 70 bucks with tax for a 2 queen room which we think was the cheapest deal in town.
Needless to say the stoke woke us up on our own. We were both up by 6:30am a half hour before the alarm. I think that’s the first time that has ever happened to me. We were ready to rock by about 7:30 and were on the way up the road. The mountain is about 6 miles from town and you definitely should have 4WD to get there (you will probably need it just to get to town).
So we get to the lodge and just like we had heard there base lodge is a tent… where you pay for tickets right next to the beer tap for later.
The lodge
Just a little stoked.
Rental shop
The heli chillin behind the rental bus…
Headed up for first run, the chairlift is recycled from Mammoth.
Stoked to be at the top after a half hour hike.
This run was sketchy, we were the last group to get up there because natural avalanches were occurring across the valley above our boot pack out.
Simply beautiful
Just a little slide path
We were first tracks on this run (pretty much every run) they basically try to “preserve the pow” and you are supposed to be kinda close to the nearest tracks to you but you get to make your own fresh tracks.
After not running most the day it cleared up enough for the heli to fly. Heli skiing is available but for an extra $160 PER RUN which I know sounds a lot after paying $120 for a ticket but it is still the cheapest heli skiing in North America. I needless to say didn’t splurge for heli, which was the right thing on that day seeing as how the people who helied only got 4 runs all day and we got 6… the snow was epic everywhere so it was not worth another $160.
STOKED!
On the way out of town. Such an EPIC day. If you enjoy riding pristine untouched DEEP pow I highly suggest you go to Silverton. Its a fraction of the price of Heli or Cat skiing and just as good. And to me half the fun was earning the turns, we hiked for 5 out of 6 runs and got to some epic terrain. But never hiked more than 30 minutes. Now here’s a video I made from my GoPro HD Hero.
Trip of Epicness from Nick Wojdak on Vimeo.
Tags: colorado, heli skiing, pow, Silverton