Winter Park – In the 200 days Brendan Irving spent battling the dense thickets on the backside of Winter Park’s Parsenn Bowl, he directed the removal of several thousand trees. He chopped down and scattered another 10,000 lodgepole pines last summer. What he hasn’t done is ski the airy glades of Parsenn’s backside, a former jungle of unskiable woodlands requiring gymnastic contortions to navigate. Until this month.
“It’s been a lot of work, but I think it’s pretty good,” said the 15-year Winter Park patroller who directed the massive, four-year thinning and glading project on Mary Jane, an endeavor that culminates this month with the opening of five new trails and a new chairlift in the former bushwhacking terrain on the backside of Parsenn Bowl.
Alongside fellow patroller Lloyd Lochridge, Irving has stomped through every copse of lodgepole, fir and spruce on the fabled Mary Jane. Last year, his just-enough removal skills debuted on the Jane’s frontside, where he orchestrated the thinning of almost 10,000 trees. His work opened roughly 300 acres of partially navigable to downright impenetrable terrain for turns.
It’s a new strategy for tree removal. A couple of decades ago, glading meant removing just about every tree in a wide swath. That evolved into leaving small timber islands amid open runs, followed by a more agrarian approach that wended skiers over and through a hill’s natural topography. The latest step – a la Irving and Lochridge – involves trimming just enough trees and removing them with helicopters, leaving not a trace of glading while allowing a little more room for expert skiers but not enough for sunshine to bake the snow or moguls to form.
Don Dressler, a Forest Service snow ranger in Minturn, visited Mary Jane for the first time last year with Irving as his guide.
“He had to show me where they had done the helicopter logging,” Dressler said. “If he had not told me that area had been logged, I’m not sure I could have identified it.”
Even though Irving approaches his thinning work with a skier’s perspective – trying to link open pockets of snow into a continuous line – the result is more panoptic, reaching well beyond skier thrills.
Removing the mountain’s pine beetle kill, hauling away deadfall and thinning the densest glades leaves the forest healthier. The fewer, stronger trees are girded for battle with the decimating beetle and ongoing drought.
“I think what Brendan and Lloyd have done is a good mix of our resource concerns and opening it up for black diamond-type tree skiing,” said Mike Ricketts, the winter-sports administrator from the Sulfur Ranger District of the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest who has worked with Irving and Lochridge on every step of the terrain glading and expansion.
But as with every change to a ski area, not everyone is tickled. Veteran tree skiers at the Jane bemoan the ease with which adventure-seeking newbies – as well as a crust-forming sunshine – infiltrate their beloved stashes of powder.
“To me, the less glading the better,” said Scott Siao, a longtime Jane bumper. “There are plenty of trees to ski. The more they open it up, the more people come in harm’s way from being in there.”
Irving knows his work fuels ire as well as gratitude.
“It definitely annoys people who think I’ve ruined the tree skiing because more people can go in there,” he said. “I like to think I’m just expanding the already good tree skiing.”
