Which, as you can see, I have just done.  They're lucky that fish wasn't attacking water skiers in the warmer months!  Further details; the pike was iced by Cody Yurek, not his son Marty, as Marty had earlier taken a nasty spill on the ice and his ardor for ice fishing had cooled.  Probably a good thing.   If a monster pike had tried to drag him under, he might have been ruined as an icefisherman for life!  The pike succombed to your basic tip-up baited with smelt in eight to ten feet of water.  46 inches!!  What a beast....  We're predicting a walleye population explosion in Lake Frances.

Took the day "off" and went skiing at Big Sky on Thursday. Earlier in the week there was a report on the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center website, that Lone Mountain had received more precipitation in the previous five days than the entire preceding six months. And incidentally, Hot Tip #1; the Avalanche Center report is an integral part of my early morning routine this time of year. It's a wealth of backcountry reports and snow safety information, and entertaining to boot. Besides being monster skiers, those guys are among other things weathermen with a sense of humor. Even if you can’t make it out snowriding in Montana’s near-endless backcountry on any given day, you can experience it in some sort of vicarious sense in their reports. Well worth checking out…. Besides, it could save your life if you’re heading into avalanche terrain.

But back on track here, on Wednesday the Big Sky Resort website was reporting an incredible six feet of fresh pow in Liberty Bowl. Whoa, baby….!  Bridger Bowl had received a stunning 34" of cold smoke. What a dilemma…. All over southwest Montana folks were plotting their absence from wherever they were scheduled to be on Thursday, and a lot of scheduled work and school activities got backburnered or ignored altogether. The only question was where to go. On Wednesday a lot of Bridger Bowl was closed due to avalanche danger. We figured they’d have at least most of the mountain open on Thursday, but you never know, and besides there was that report of six feet at Big Sky. Man…. I haven’t skied in powder that deep in just ages!

One other factor came into play in the decision, which constitutes Hot Tip #2. A while back I’d come across a source for bargain lift tickets at Bridger Bowl, Big Sky, and Big Mountain. $30 at Bridger, $40 at Big Sky, and as I recall $35 at Big Mountain. I’m not planning any ski safaris to Whitefish in the near future, so didn’t pay that close of attention to the Big Mountain prices. Anyway, I discovered notice of this matter on a notice posted on an outdoor equipment bulletin board at MSU. Contact information consisted of an e-mail address, montanaskifanatics@hotmail.com, which I promptly fired off an inquiry to. That was during the Christmas holiday, and although the respondent replied with details immediately, at the time the ski conditions were less than stellar and I held off. Wednesday night I fired off another last-minute inquiry, and somewhat to my surprise found out there were still bargain tickets available and made arrangements to pick some up Thursday morning. I must admit, I had some misgivings and was half expecting to find a dreadlocked Ridge Hippie peddling purloined passes out of a trench coat in an alley someplace. Au Contraire….! This deal is completely on the up & up, and the man with the plan is as clean-cut and enterprising of young entrepreneur as you’d care to meet. The tickets are surplus from a state sponsored Learn-To-Ski program, (Hot Tip #3) which is a very worthwhile thing in itself if you’re looking for a nice package combining lift tickets, equipment rentals, and lessons. And hey, those last two tips are the slickest deals I’ve come across in some time, at least as far as skiing goes.

Since normal fare at Big Sky is $58, that clinched the decision, and Thursday morning we joined the caravan of folks heading down the Gallatin Canyon toward Big Sky. As I mentioned in a previous column, half the reason I have been wanting to go to Big Sky is for the view from the top of the Lone Peak Tram. On the way down the Canyon the surrounding peaks were socked in with fog, and it appeared visibility would be limited at best. Who cared, though? Six feet of powder, remember….?? About the time we were getting close to the turnoff into Big Sky, though, the fog started dissipating, with tantalizing hints of blue sky peeking through, and shortly it had cleared off altogether and Lone Mountain lay before us, thrusting up into the blue sky like some giant white pyramid! Oh..! We were coming absolutely unhinged with anticipation!! Sunshine, blue skies, and six feet of fresh, light powder!!!

It was on the way up the first lift, the Swift Current Quad, that the first hints of doubt started to creep in. Yeah, there was fresh snow, but it appeared to be more in the one foot range. Not to worry, though, the six feet report had specified Liberty Bowl, off the top of Lone Mountain. So, I pushed my skeptical alter ego into the nether reaches of my mind, and forged on to the Lone Peak Triple Chair and the bowl. Companions wanted to make a run in the Bowl before venturing to the tippy-top of the mountain, and with the first turns my cynical alter ego once again made its presence known.

The natives of the far north and other climates where snow is a major factor of life have a whole vocabulary for the infinite variations of the white stuff. Montana snow adjectives may not run into the hundreds, but still certainly will number in the dozens. The term for the stuff I found myself rocketing through at Big Sky is a singularly coarse term dating back to my ski patrol days. Used to excess, which seems the norm for a lot of people and snowboarders, the term is offensive and sort of low-class, IMO, but there’s times when nothing else really quite does the job. The snow at Big Sky that day was what can only be called Wind-F***. When the wind gets to working on a fresh dump of snow, it does skiers no favors. It compacts the powder into something that is just plain challenging to ski.

Now I have perhaps more experience than most with the aforementioned wind-foo. I grew up skiing at Teton Pass, a delightful little mountain (actually it’s a big mountain, but the lifts only go about halfway up) deep in the Lewis Range of the Rocky Mountain Front west of Choteau. The scenery up there is unmatched, but unfortunately, so is the wind. Builds character, I suppose. I know it taught me that you can never relax when skiing wind-pack. In powder, you can get away with a few mistakes, but in wind-poo if you get just a little too far forward, you’ll nosedive, lose forward momentum at a truly startling rate, and invariably biff it onto your nose. Get even just a little far back on your skis, and your turn will just instantly cease to occur, and you’ll rocket off course in whatever direction you were aimed at the moment as if shot from a catapult. That is a disconcerting sensation, usually followed by overcompensation in one direction or another, and down you go again! Wears on ‘ya after a while….

It appears technology may have come to the rescue, however. After our bowl run, we lost a couple of our group to the lower reaches of the mountain, but the survivors gathered in the line for the Tram. Now I am resistant to fashion trends, but it immediately became apparent that in order to fit in with the Tram crowd, you need a helmet and a pair of fat skis! My buddy Mike was demoing a pair of fatties. I swear, those things are wide as water skis and must weigh the better part of twenty pounds. Now he is a good skier anyway, but he was able to blow through the crud with absolute impunity. He didn’t have to spend just too awful long standing around waiting for me, but keeping up was a challenge, I tell ya…

My boards aren’t exactly skinny skis, they’re some Salomon X-Screams; what passed for shaped skis a few years back. And just the day before, I had scored a screaming deal (less than half price!) on a pair of apparently brand new Scarpa Denali Alpine Touring boots at Second Wind, a local consignment sporting good store. Those (my top choice, but I’d been watching for a deal on any sort of decent AT boots) have a latching mechanism that you can unlock for uphill touring, and lock for the descent. They’re moderately stiff when locked, but noticeably less so than my antiquated Salomon rear-entry boots, and while I only biffed it a couple of times, I was right on that fine edge of losing it most of the day. On the way home Mike commented that when his usual monster skier companions first got fat boards, he was having just a deuce of a time keeping up, and usually felt like he was right on the ragged edge of control. No kidding, dude! I can relate completely….

So as you’ve probably deduced, there was considerably less than the purported six feet of snow up top. Man, I’d hate to think that was just a bald-faced lie, but either a lot of it blew away, they found some spot in where a bunch of snow had fallen off trees,  were measuring horizontally, got confused with the metric system, or…. Upon our return, I checked the Big Sky snow report again, and while they were still claiming the six feet in Liberty Bowl, in another part of the report they had the more realistic total of one to two feet. Feh…! When we left that morning, the Avalanche Center report hadn’t been updated yet, but checking that after the fact revealed the truth of the matter; that the Bridgers had indeed gotten 34" of the most delightful powder known to mankind, while the accumulation in the Big Sky vicinity of the Madison Range was more like a foot, and the wind had done its number on that.

So, confound it anyway, I wish we’d gone to Bridger! Reports from folks who skied there indicate just overwhelming satisfaction, accompanied by advanced exhaustion. Oh, well, Big Sky was still fun. There’s something to be said for standing on the top of 11, 166’ Lone Mountain, even if the wind is howling by and the chill factor is someplace way into the negative range. All the same, I will be viewing their snow reports with a jaundiced eye, and requiring corroborating evidence from trusted sources before I swallow any further six feet reports again.