As Kyle alluded to in his last post, I went and skied some powder at Altoona Ridge Lodge! Yes this was more than a week ago, and yes I have a serious procrastination problem (i'll get around to fixing that one of these days).  Fortunately it is 2012 and we can share images digitally and they do not deteriorate like daguerreotypes.

After leaving around 6am we finally started to wake up once some snow flakes began to fall.  Altoona Lodge is located in the Pintlers, so driving from bozeman we passed the current sheet of ice known as Georgetown Lake then drove on past Philipsburg on our way to the trail-head.  At the trail-head we all began smiling, strapping and stretching in preparation for the roughly five mile hike in.  Luckily we only broke one beer (don't worry we salvaged most of the contents) when loading the sled so after a bit of reorganizing we watched all our food and booze follow the one snowmobile up the trail ahead of us... Now i'm faced with a tricky transition - so i'll just come out and say it, we only hiked about two miles in, thanks to the snowmobile making great time then retuning to shuttle the rest of us up in tow.  Once at the (rather shwanky) lodge we established our game plan for the next two night and three days and set about skiing, hitting the sauna, cooking meals, and primarily enjoying ourselves. 

 Alex sending it deep

 Cris and Tod 

Cris about to land in the flats - but doing it with style!

Hiking up to the main ridge 

So all in all it was a great weekend.  I should also add that the weekend after this, I once again found myself skiing at Lost Trail after they received a generous amount of snow. I have no pictures to prove it so you'll just have to trust me when I tell you it was terrible and the mountain no longer exists thanks to a giant volcano imploding the entire range...

Á bientôt,

Aaron