Gash Creek BC Ski- January 3, 2026

Participants: Levi Stubblefield, Ben Bagniewski, Bily Brown, Tandra Schmid, Alex Karafiat, Tony LeBaron, Francis Horton (leader), & Sean Colvin (leader)

Initial plans were to start the New Year off at Lolo Pass, but balmy January temps pushed us to seek higher elevation at Gash Creek. We carpooled from the Missoula fog to the Lower Gash Creek trailhead and started up the trail on foot around 9:45am. We made the switch to skis once we met the road near the upper trailhead and only had to take them off once to skip an early bare patch before being able to complete our ascent for the day on skins.

After a bit of discussion, the Center?/Main?/East?/Mini? Gash bowl (Gash lingo is a bit of a mystery to me) became our objective for the day as it looked nicely filled in, and was known to Francis as good ski with manageable terrain. Intermittent sun and a steady breeze kept temps and snow conditions pleasant throughout the day. As we made our way up to the bowl, the snow quality kept improving and our optimism for good skiing grew. At about 7600’ we dug a pit to see what condition the snowpack was in, and saw perhaps a bit more reactivity than we were expecting. While our plan was always to stick to low-angle terrain, this was an interesting look into the complex snowpack this early “winter” is throwing at us.

From the pit we continued our climb up the bowl to ~8000’ at which point most of the crew transitioned to downhill mode. A few of us went for a few hundred more bonus-vert and transitioned just a bit shy of the ridge line. The descent started around 2:30pm, which by perfect coincidence had been our pre-established turn-around time. We made fun turns all the way down the bowl in moderately dense but nicely consistent powder. From the bottom of the bowl, we switched to survival skiing mode to traverse the lower ridge that connected us back to the summer trail and made it partly down the trail before transitioning back to foot travel a short ways above the upper trailhead.

A relatively quick jaunt down to the lower trailhead had us back at the cars by 4:15pm with spirits high after completing a ~7 mile, ~3200’ day. We made the trek back to Missoula and capped off the outing with burgers and beers at Flippers. A gorgeous day out in the Bitterroot with great people. Can’t ask for much more than that.