Nikolai Schirmer and crew are back for another season of one of the best small production series out there. In this season's third episode, the ski one of the biggest faces in Norway, a 2500-foot face that looks straight out of Alaska, complete with spines, cliffs and seracs. Nikolai and his crew manage to get the face in prime conditions and show off the skills it takes to ride in such complex terrain.

11/28/23 - This week’s stoke:

What we’re watching:

• Katie Burrell's Weak Layers Trailer - Katie Burrell never ceases to make the entire industry laugh. In case you've also been lurking on her socials over the last year, you'll know she's been cooking up another feature-length film - this time it's a real-life drama, and one that a lot of us can probably relate to. Can you count the pro skier cameos?

• Blank Collective's Fortune Hunters - If you like watching powder skiing, look no further than literally anything the Blank Collective has ever put out. Their latest film Fortune Hunters takes the crew all across BC (yes, there's pillows galore), to the High Sierra, to the woods of Niseko.

The Beta:

• Alta Opens To a Powder Day - The Wasatch has had one of the better early season snowfalls out of anywhere in the lower 48. Alta opened this past Satuday with 10 inches reported from the last two days. They already have a base depth of 38" allowing them to get a good start on opening terrain. If your considering an early season ski trip the resorts of Utah might deliver the best conditions.

• The NPS Is Challenging Fixed Climbing Anchors Again - The US National Parks Service and US Forest Service have a weird history with fixed climbing anchors on federal land, and has proposed a new rule re-defining all fixed gear (read: bolts, rappel stations, and other anchors) as a permanent installation - which means it would have to undergo the same tedious review process as things like roads, garbage dumps or fence lines. The rule wouldn't outright ban anchors or force their removal, but would mean that each piece of permanently placed gear would have to undergo an approval process by already underfunded and understaffed federal agencies - essentially changing climbing in National Parks as we know it. A public comment period is open for 60 days.

Elevating the Craft:

• Google's Deep Learning Weather Model Outperforms Traditional Models - Google released an open source neural network model that was trained on nearly 40 years of weather data. The model outperforms existing weather models in 90 percent of cases. While traditional weather models run physics-based simulation to predict weather from current observations this model instead was trained on the data and statistically predicts the next state. Traditional models take many hours to run on supercomputers but the new model, once trained, can make predictions in about a minute. While it's not immediately clear how accurate this will be for things like snow total predictions this will reduce the cost of running weather simulations and should increase reliability of all weather forecasts including snow in the near future.

• Avalance Hazard Prediction Using Lasers? - A new app AspectAvy is looking to change the way we use technology to understand avalanche hazard. No, it doesn't actually let you use lasers to determine hazard, but it overlays your position on a high-definition LiDAR map to give you an idea of what kind of danger you can expect to find in your exact location by combining data like slope angle, aspect, and current weather and avalanche forecast to give each slope a rating. In reality, it does some of the route finding work for you to stay out of avalanche terrain.

Sidetracked:

• Old Guy's Wisdom Who's Spent Most His Life Skiing Goes Viral - Wise words from an Aspen Highlands local - "I spent most of my life skiing, the rest I wasted."

• A Portable Backcountry Rope Tow - The PL1 from Zoa Enginneering is a battery-powered portable rope tow designed to let you lap your favorite zone beyond the lifts. They claim that on a 15-degree slope, a 180 pound skier would get 3000 feet of vertical per charge. While we don't thing this will be a game changer for backcountry skiing it could be useful for laps on a backcountry jump or hot laps on a small slope as you're learning to ski.

Thanks for reading and see you next week,
Max Ritter and Andrey Shprengel