Ten years had gone by since Sven Brunso last stood on Smelter Mountain with a view of downtown Durango framed between the tips of his skis. An unforgettable winter storm last week brought back that old familiar feeling.
Brunso was one of several ski and snowboard enthusiasts who didn’t have to push deep into the backcountry to find perfect powder turns, rock drops and technical runs after Durango received 48.9 inches of snow in February, with more than 3 feet since Valentine’s Day. After the latest storm dropped light, fluffy snow, a world of opportunities opened for in-city skiing, and Brunso was there to rediscover a long-lost love.
“The last winter we had where you could kind of do everything was the winter of 2008-09,” Brunso said. “In the 10 years before that, it was almost every year where you could do this stuff, but things kind of dried up after ’09.
“Looking between your ski tips and seeing Durango is exciting. You are looking down on town and kind of flip-flopping the view you have all year long looking up at Smelter and imagining being up on it and skiing. Once you get into it, you have to put the novelty fact of skiing right outside of town behind you because it’s some really serious terrain up there. But when you stop, regroup or wait for a partner and you’re in a safe spot and can look down and see the train smoke as it goes through town and hear the train whistle or you look down and see your house or where you’re going to have lunch, it’s pretty surreal to be able to do that.”
Brunso is an iconic skier with more than 2,000 published photos and more than 100 cover photos for some of the sport’s biggest publications. He came to Durango from California in 1988 for his freshman year at Fort Lewis College before he finished his last three years at the University of Arizona. He quickly moved back to Durango after he graduated and got his big break in 1995 and has filled pages with epic skiing photos ever since. He’s skied all over the world and has tackled every mountain along the U.S. Highway 550 corridor from Durango to Ouray.
The chance to skin up and ski down areas such as Hogsback, Raiders Ridge and Smelter Mountain – all at an elevation less than 8,000 feet – have become among the more rare tracks.
Andrew Fraquelli High formed another team of in-town riders. He strapped on his snowboard and tackled Raiders Ridge and Smelter Mountain for three consecutive days of riding. Brunso and High said there was a solid base of 3- to 4-feet of snow everywhere, and the extra snow that fell on top of the base made for prime conditions with a stable snowpack.
High said his crew has been able to hit 10-foot rock drops without so much as a scratch on the bottom of their boards all week.
Ten years ago, High said he and some friends skied at the bottom apron of Smelter Mountain above the dog park and were also able to ride some runs from Rim Drive down off the side of Chapman Hill. Until this week, he hadn’t skied from the top of Smelter.
“I never thought I would see Durango with this much snow ever again, to be honest,” High said. “I’ve looked at some of those lines on Smelter and climbed up some erosion drainages in the summer time. It’s so boulder-choked and there’s so much scrub oak all over the side of that mountain, I just never imagined it would be filled in enough where we’re making turns without worrying about even hitting the bottom. It’s surreal to see a base in Durango to the point where you can fly off a cliff and not worry about smacking your head on a rock if you flip over or something.”
While skiing and riding with a view of downtown Durango can be comforting, the danger of the city mountains is real. In 2008, a skier was caught in an avalanche while descending the north-facing side of Smelter and required rescue.
Brunso said Smelter demands excellent navigation skills to piece together sections of the mountain without a clean line from the top to the bottom. Ridges, gully crossings and “billy goat” descents of rock faces are part of the territory, he said. But once a skier gets down onto the apron of the mountain, there’s great skiing all the way down to the Animas River.
“One thing I think people kind of take for granted because it’s in the city limits is they tend to forget it’s backcountry skiing and there’s some danger up there,” Brunso said. “If someone got hurt up there, it would be a really challenging rescue for someone to get out of there. There’s avalanche danger and things you find in the big mountains. It just so happens that the mountain is right in our city limits.”
High is originally from Denver, and he moved to Durango to attend FLC and has stayed ever since. He compared some of the terrain on Smelter to that of Silverton Mountain with steep lines in prime avalanche-slope conditions.
“We cut off to a little couloir on the north side of Smelter Mountain that I never, ever thought we’d have access to ski,” High said. “At that point, I finally got nervous about what we were doing and thought, ‘This is actually pretty crazy.’”
Brunso said not much has changed on Smelter or on the lines above the Bodo Industrial Park in the last decade, though access to Smelter is now limited to between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and he’s had to find some creative ways to the top of lines above Bodo with Division of Wildlife access gates closed.
Raiders Ridge is a more recent opportunity Brunso hadn’t even thought about since the mid-’90s, before the SkyRidge development existed. When it comes to Hogsback, Brunso tries to ski the spine-covered mountain at least once each season, though he wasn’t able to last winter. While Hogsback requires less snow to be skiable, it can also be the most dangerous of the nearby mountains.
“Hogsback, because there’s no vegetation to worry about, you don’t need much snow to ski,” Brunso said. “That’s one where you get 12 to 18 inches of snow of the right consistency and you can kind of ski that.
“Hogsback is interesting because it’s true spine skiing, kind of like in Alaska even though it’s right here just outside city limits. It’s pretty technical, and you gotta pretty much stay on the spine itself and ski pretty fast so you don’t get pulled over to the sides. When the conditions are right, the snow is kind of sluffing with you because it’s so steep. It doesn’t take much momentum for the sluff to be able to take you off your feet. It’s not a place to go up and ski conservatively or with trepidation. You gotta kind of go. It’s tricky and pretty exposed. If you get pulled off in either of those gullies, you get going fast and can get in trouble pretty quick. Of all the things we’ve been skiing, Hogsback is by far the most technical.”
While the terrain may not have changed much during the 10 years since Brunso last skied Smelter, the growing number of tracks around town are a development. As backcountry skiing has grown in popularity, there are more thrill-seekers eager to discover fresh lines.
“The last time Smelter was doable, myself and my buddies were the only ones doing it,” Brunso said. “With two of us skiing, if you saw 16 tracks up there, it meant we had done eight laps. Now, I’m probably responsible for a couple sets of tracks on Smelter along with Chris Forrest, but there are more people getting after it. There’s all kinds of lines from the summit now that people are putting in places I haven’t seen tracks before. I think it’s a bit of the novelty of having really fun skiing here in town with really good access. You can look at Smelter from downtown all year and kind of imagine what it might be like if there’s enough snow to ride it. To actually have it come into play, all it takes is that first person to put tracks up there for people to look at it, see it and want to go up and put their own tracks. It starts the fury to get up there.”
After the winter of 2017-18, nobody is certain when there will be another chance to descend a line with downtown Durango in sight. And for Brunso and High, that is OK. They’ve settled in Durango for its variety of outdoor sports. Though Brunso is a sponsored skier, he’s happy to call Durango home, even in lackluster snow years.
“The reason I moved here is that it’s a mountain town that has access to skiing instead of being a pure ski town,” said Brunso, who will head to Switzerland and Norway for spring skiing projects in the coming weeks. “In ski towns, it revolves completely around skiing. When there’s bad winters like last winter, everyone is bummed out and there’s this real negative energy. In Durango, last year even though it was a pretty dire winter season, friends of mine were happy to ride their mountain bikes all year. People put their skis away and went climbing in the desert and found other things to do.
“Most years, we have four really solid seasons. Just about the time you’re tired of one season, you’re into the next one. And, if it’s dry here in May and you want to ski, you drive an hour north and you’re in the San Juans. ... These days, during a season like this, it’s like, wow, this is a really cool ski town to have snow and be able to do all this stuff and ride your bike to and from the start of the skinning. It’s neat to have this right in our backyard.”
jlivingston@durangoherald.com
