TGRVPCSF010

Big Day, 2 huge lines, stellar weather, great snow, 3 valley traverse. Simply one of the best backcountry days I've ever had.

Billy's vid:



Up Raina from Ram Valley:

Upper Peters Creek!!!!!!! BIG MOUNTAINS!

Jeff dropping into the Raina Chute:

Jeff in his element...

Back up  the south side of Peeking. baking sun, sticky snow. Was glad to get this one done with. de-ja vu from a few weeks ago

Looking down the Peeking cooler.  umm we're skiing what? Huge, intimidating and very limited visibility for spotters.

words just are not quite cutting it on how this was. Billy is the tiny dot in the middle. It's big!

The North side of Peeking is a total alpine playground!

Touring over 2 more ridges to get back to the start..

At the pass above falling water, only 3000' down to go here.

JT and his dog August House... August chased some Sheep and decended a super gnarly cliffy slope. He won the sack award of the day for sure on that one.

With 8000 vertical under our feet we made it down to the car and with several days of euphoria packed away. slay.

re-designin

Its easy to get caught up and not take the time to try to improve things. So I spent a few days last week on the following:
Super Twinkie - It's still gigantic and not for 98% of my customers. but hey, "it" lives on...

 psyched on how it came out, much improved top pocket and elimination of the extension seam and stress point, mostly though the improvements were to make the patterns more precise and the bags come out more consistent and save headaches.


next - gas tank.
the Small gas tank is no more... I was only getting 1 in 25 orders for it anyway, so the new tank is a bit shorter than the old medium, but taller.  The 2 1" straps bar tacked to the bottom have been consolidated into a single reinforced 2" strap which will give more compatibility with frames with head tube gussets. Also I'm adding a little flap to cover the gap at the front and fully lining the bags with white fabric.  sweet...

mucho mejor..

Crusties for breakfast

Wake up at 6:00 am..
Drink 1 French press
drive 45 minutes.
Breakfast is Served!

These crusties were a bit on the soft side. I hope to eat harder crusties soon.

Falling water Valley

Billy, Dan, Pat and Todd and I went in to the Falling water valley to ski the chutes on Rainia's North Face. Great Day I've only looked into the area before from the mile high ridge. Lots of big terrain to be found.

The couloir we went up is the one on the left. Raina's main Chute is over to the left around the corner.

The view... what an awesome day.

Dug a pit.. found a funky layer 18" down. Continued booting up... was not feeling great about it dug another and found more of the same with pretty easy shears. We called it about 2/3rds of the way, just before the angle kicked up some more.

At the bottom we ran into Viking, Nora, Dave, Mel and Cathy. They came in from Ram Valley and skied the main Chute. Awesome! It was good to be back into the sun. I had Peeking on my brain so headed up the basin further. Trying to keep motivation going. :)

 It was just Billy and I that headed up the next gully, nice sun crust corn for skinning.

 Finally out of the chute and up onto Peeking's West face. The snow changed dramatically from spring corn - a deep winter snowpack.

We stopped shy of the summit, too early for this stuff at 6,500'. 


Nice turns in the cooler... nice views too.

Viva spring in the Chugash!!

update - Billy's photos here

this and that,

ot much exciting lately.
This has been the view for the most part:

Aside from wildlife viewing a lot got sewn together this week.

I set up to do a batch cutting job with more layers than I'd ever cut with my little electric 3" blade... It got hot fast and reminded me of that smell when you're mixing cookie douugh with a cheap-o mixer... not good.
It was a good excuse to try out my latest ebay impulse purchase. It's a little ahead of it's time for sure but I like buying cool industrial equipment.  Think chop saw with a razor blade for fabric:

It worked but it was like gardening with a bulldozer... over gunned, needed more layers and weight. Back to smokin' little blue.

Did I mention it's Friday?

Enough shop stuff.  I got some fun Press lately. The first was west coast based Momentum magazine, they got wind of the pugsley beach trips and did a little blurb. Here is the web link.


Alaska Airlines magazine also did a breif profile of Epic Designs this month with a few other local business big and small.  It's short and sweet, but I had to laugh however at the caption for the photo.
If you're flying this month you'll see what I mean.