so... that thread I created a week ago or so about people who refuse to hike, well... on that same topic here's another thread about people and hiking.
Now - a lot of you will think I sound like a hypocrite in this thread, most of you probably won't understand (due to your lack of mountains and slack-country), but whatever.
So, as I stated in my last thread, I think that skiers who refuse to hike are lazy and don't understand the fundamentals of a sport the requires you to get to the top of the mountain before going down. With that in mind, one thing that really, really pisses me off is people who go hike for turns when it's a powder day inbounds. There are quite a few people at my ski resort (mostly the older dudes who are pretentious and consider themselves a better person than anyone who doesn't hike as much as they do) who do such a thing.
One of my good skier friends pulled this shit on me today. We woke up to 10cms of fresh and it was still snowing. Went up for first chair, and every run was better than the last. I run into my friend at around 11am and he poses the quesiton: "you wanna go do a run up [enter backcountry peak name here]?" I got all pissy with him and said no, convincing him otherwise.
I find this extremely annoying for a few reasons. Mainly - there's lift accessible pow, there's no one on the hill, and it's just getting better. second, with 40cm of new storm snow in the past two days with more every minute and low visibility, does going in avalanche terrain really sound like a good idea? I just find it frustrating that people are so powder greedy that they feel the need to go track out the slack country that much quicker when they could have an amazing inbounds powder run. It's like the whole "no friends on a powder day"... well one day you're going to ditch your friend, and find out later that night that he got seriously injured and got left behind to find his own way to safety 'cause you just had to get to that untouched stash before anyone else.
Alright, I've said enough. Not sure how I expect people to respond to this. but, we'll see how this thread turns out. I sound like a parent or a teacher or something right now probably, but whatever, you can never be too safe, or something.