Chuska backcountry adventure

My prior post leads me nicely into some exploring that we did yesterday afternoon around Buffalo Pass.

After quite a bit of lazing around, we decided to finally get our act together, strap some skis on our backpacks, throw the snowshoes and the tire chains in the car and head towards the snow-covered "closed in winter" pass. Though paved, the road that provides quite a shortcut across the Chuska mountains to Shiprock, Farmington and places north into Colorado, is quite windy and steep - 14% grade, no exaggeration, in sections. We've driven it plenty in summer, we've even biked over it during training for last year's Iron Horse. But they don't plow it in winter, and apparently even close a gate on the New Mexico side near Red Valley.
Sure enough, as soon as we got to the lower reaches of the road where it begins to climb and wind through the lower canyons, the evidence of recent record snowfalls remained on the road, with a few brave tracks continuing on. We put the chains on the Jeep, and with Dave and Julie leading the way, slugged through the snow up and up until we decided it was time to just park and attempt a few ski runs.We found a forest road that seemed sufficient, so we put on our skis, strapped on the snowshoes and took our first backcountry runs down some shallow slopes until we couldn't go down safely anymore. There was a bit of climbing, another quick downhill, then back up to the cars.

After climbing thus high in the car, we couldn't let the opportunity pass to ski back down the road. The boys got to have their fix of driving and succeeding (just once) in getting the cars stuck in the snow, while Julie and I boarded/skied down to road. For some reason, the combination of sticky snow, the unknown on each side of the road, the fairly narrow sections of ski-able snow to each side of the crunchy tracks, and a few steep windy sections all conspired to reducing me to a beginning level skier who pretty much forgot all knowledge of how to turn on skis. It meant that I pretty much pizza wedged the whole way down the mountain, but still had a blast! Got to the bottom and piled back in the cars just as it was getting too dark to see anymore.

Please forgive the poor quality dark pictures, taken with our old, cheap, smallish camera. And though it adds to the allure, it wasn't nearly that dark while we were skiing.