The cat heading down the Vertebrae Glacier to pick us up 2500ft below. Sullivan Fault in the background. This is near the highest spot the cat can drive to, around 9500ft.

This was our first morning out, and possibly the scariest part of the trip. The road gets a little gnarlier than this, and looking out the window right into a rock-strewn chute while you feel the track slipping as the cat tries to navigate the ridgetop - well, that woke us up. This is called the "Super-road", and is new for this year. photo by Bill Frans

They don't joke around with the sno-roads here. This is from our second day, in an area that they also just opened up this year.

Our driver for the 4 days was Pete - this was his first time driving this "down only" road. Dale had opened it only a few days earlier. He inched the cat down as slowly as possible, until it finally lost its grip on the slope - then its full power downhill! It's a little too small to see in this shrunk-down photo, but there is a fracture line across the slope that happened while building the road (which they do in the middle of the night). The road-building is part of the avalanche control they do.

Another view of the Super-road, and one of the other groups cat. They operate 3 cats, but you rarely see the others around - the first run on this morning (the 3rd day) was an exception. The tracks descending to the right are our group's, from the first day.

One of the new areas they started using this year. I think at this point the Rockies had gone close to two weeks without snow, which explains the plethora of tracked up (but not tracked out) terrain. Later on this day, we took a run that went just left of center in this picture, through the trees. And then another through the chute left of the orange rocks (halfway down - unfortunately the cat can't make it up to the highest ridge).