Growing up in Boulder as the son of a mountaineer who climbed several Himalayan peaks, Austin Porzak spent a lot of time admiring the iconic Flatirons that loom over his hometown. This week he experienced one of them in a way no one had previously.
This past Sunday, Porzak made what is believed to be the first ski descent of the First Flatiron, followed by partner Alex Krull.
“I did it just because I am born and raised here in Boulder, Colorado, and I’ve been staring at the Flatirons my whole life,” said Porzak, 33, a professional “big mountain” skier. “It was an amazing project that presented itself to me over the course of about five years.”
It took that long because it is rare for the steep Flatirons to hold enough snow to be skiable, but the series of big storms that dumped on the Front Range in recent weeks made the 800-foot descent possible. By comparison, the tallest buildings in downtown Denver are about 700 feet tall.
Porzak and Krull didn’t ski from the high point of the peak because the uppermost 200 feet are too steep to hold snow, but Porzak identified a ski route from the summit ridge into a gully that collects snow from above. In the winter, the East Face Gully becomes a 600-foot ice climbing route called the Silk Road. Porzak and Krull skied that and another 200 feet below it to the base of the face.
Porzak’s father, Glenn, climbed Mount Everest in 1990 and was the fourth American to complete the “Seven Summits” (the highest peak on all seven continents). As president of the American Alpine Club from 1989-91, he was the driving force behind an effort that moved the AAC headquarters from New York to Golden, along with the renovation of the former Golden High School into a building that became the American Mountaineering Center.
Austin is several years into a quest to ski all of Colorado’s Fourteeners via the most difficult route on each. He has four more to do.
Closer to home, he got interested in skiing the Flatirons after Bill Wright and Stefan Griebel skied part of the Third Flatiron in 2007, making the first Flatirons ski descent. Porzak did the second descent of the Third Flatiron in 2010 and then turned his attention to the First.
“Every time it would snow, I would hike up there or look through binoculars, kind of inspect the line, see where snow was filling in,” Porzak said. “I started noticing that after real big storms, this thing looks like a steep snow climb for a day or two. That’s kind of where I got the idea that this could be doable under the perfect conditions.”
Porzak made his first attempt two years ago but wasn’t able to complete the descent because the snow under his skis kept sliding out from underneath him.
It takes more than a lot of snow to make the descent doable. It takes heavy snowfall, followed by warm temperatures to melt that snow, followed by cold temperatures to turn that snowmelt into ice, then heavy snowfall on top of that ice. The surface snow has to bond to the ice underneath it in order for the route to be skiable.
Porzak was protected with a belay from a climbing rope on three 60-meter sections, because a fall could have been fatal.
“The entire ski line was a challenge,” Porzak said. “It was a puzzle, and I had to put the puzzle together as I descended. If your edge were to go out (without belay), you’re done. There was ice underneath the snow. And even without all this snow, and it being skiable, it was a very fine line between being skiable and being an ice climb.”
Near the bottom, he encountered an ascending ice climber who was shocked to see a skier descending.
“It was really a challenge I wanted to take on after skiing the Third Flatiron,” Porzak said. “I wanted to do something else, something unique. I kept my eye on the prize and stayed focused. I knew it could be done.”
John Meyer: jmeyer@denverpost.com or
