Porter Fork with Rosie pup

With an AK trip on the horizon, I’m happy to brush up on my web logging skills.  After our recon walk / sledding adventure up Porter Fork several weeks ago, we knew there was some good ski touring to be had in the area.  With stable snow and sun in the forecast we headed back up that way today.  The ride up the canyon was frighteningly snowless, but we were relieved to find that the snow line was right near the road entrance.  We had a mostly continuous walk for the first bit

 

Low down it felt winter and spring were battling

 

Eventually it started feeling like winter

 

After a long approach up the road and then the trail, our objective came into view (seen here behind the cute puppy dog)

 

Up we went!

 

One nice element of this tour was that I actually broke trail on the up.  A side effect of the easy access in the Wasatch is that usually someone has already set a skinner in most popular zones.  We had the entire area to ourselves today, a rare feeling of wilderness in a (rightfully) popular range.

By this point Rosie was showing signs of fatigue, and instead of bounding up and down the hill as she had lower down, she wisely chose to follow our skin track of somewhat compacted snow

And while the change of pace and the solitude were nice, breaking trail is hard!

After too many switchbacks, we made it to our drop point.  Here you can see the tip of my ski as well as the run, so you know we made it 🙂

 

After a quick changeover we were on the way down.  Yours truly here

 

Rosie is a natural powder hound

 

And she enjoyed chasing her momma down the apron, yelping the entire way

 

Slayage

 

After the run we headed back down the trail, which had thankfully transitioned from icy death luge to a soft carvable corn surface.  Out of focus evidence

 

Great day getting Rosie into real ski terrain, and having an awesome untracked zone to spend the day with the fam.  Thanks for looking