“Local guidebook author Fritz Sperry knows the Colorado backcountry as well as anybody. The Outdoor Journal were invited on an outing, so Kela Fetters grabbed her Skis and started trekking.
It’s early March, and there are signs that Old Man Winter’s stranglehold on the Tenmile Range is giving. The first evidence is auditory; birdsong punctuates the otherwise mute atmosphere of Mt. Victoria’s evergreens. It’s snowing, but the temperature hovers just below freezing and the resulting flakes are quick to liquesce. Rainbow Creek, invisible but animated, gurgles under several feet of snowpack. Fritz Sperry, doyen of Colorado’s Front Range backcountry skiing guidebooks, is deep in research—waist-deep, in fact, given last night’s snowstorm.
In guidebook parlance, “research” is synonymous with “training”. Sperry uses his go-to powder stache in the Tenmile Range as the setting for notching some spectacular vertical. It will all pay off come springtime when he will redeem his accumulated fitness on big lines around the state…
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