Barnard Hut Ski Trip, Aspen, Colorado
It only took us until April to go on our first backcountry skiing hut trip of the year. Better late in the season than never. The Barnard Hut was our first time to a hut in the Braun & Friends hut system. I had reserved this hut almost a year ago for a long weekend this April.
We began Friday at home with an early wake up since we had a 2.5 hour drive to Aspen. To get to this hut, the least strenuous way actually involves taking the Silver Queen gondola at Aspen Mountain to the top and then touring ~7 miles and 1200 vert along Richmond Ridge out to the hut. We got on the gondola around 10am and began our adventure. The skin along the ridge provided awesome views in all directions for much of the tour. Snowmobiles are allowed on this ridge so the snow was very packed down for us and no trail breaking was required. With temperatures in the 50s, we were very quickly sweating and had stripped down to our base layers. The ridge was rolling so we hard periods of uphill and periods of downhill, but kept our skins on the whole time. It took us just over 3 hours to make it to the hut.
Since we were the first ones at the hut, we got the fire going and started melting some snow for water. It was a beautiful day and the back deck of the hut provided a great view to sit and take in. An hour or two after we got there, the other couple that would be joining us arrived. There was supposed to be a third couple joining as well, but they had woken up sick the day before and had to cancel last minute. We settled in and went to bed early that night after a big bowl of ramen for dinner.
Saturday morning we woke up and headed up to the ridge on McArthur Mountain. The views from the ridge were stunning. After taking some pictures, we focused our attention on our ski options. We elected to do some runs on some east and northeast facing terrain from the ridge. The runs were fairly short, but long enough to keep us entertained. Once we were all tired enough where we didn’t have a desire to go back uphill, we headed back to the hut to relax for the rest of the day.
The following morning we got up, made breakfast, and tidied up the hut. Because the route back to Aspen was going to be along the same rolling ridge we came in on, we knew there would be a fair amount of uphill. We kept our skins on for the majority of the way back. This was my least favorite part about this hut - it felt uphill on both the way in and way out. We were completely exhausted on Sunday night. We had no issues on the way out and decided to ski down Aspen Mountain instead of taking the gondola down. We got a few funny looks with our large backpacks on, but it was nice to ski a groomed run that had been softened by the sun after all of the other skiing and touring we had done that weekend.
Overall, it was a great weekend spent with friends and away from cell phone service. Because the skiing options were a bit more limited, I’m interested in checking a few of the other Braun & Friends Huts before going back to this one.
