Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Gear 30 on the Blister Podcast Network. I'm Sam

Shaheen, a senior editor at Blister, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing

over at Blister Review.com. Today I'm talking with Jonathan Ellsworth about a big objective

I recently completed on Torrey's Peak in Colorado.

We discussed the details of this so-called Torrey's Peak Triple Crown, the D-scale of rating ski descents,

the gear, apparel, and food that I used on the mountain, and we finish up with a discussion of the safety and

decision-making process throughout the day. I've been working on completing this objective for several years,

so it feels great to have finally ticked it off,

and I think this conversation could be useful and interesting

for anyone who likes to spend time in the mountains.

Well, Sam Shaheen, you just had a pretty big day in the mountains,

and so we just kind of thought that it might be interesting to some

people to hear about this day of yours and then to get kind of the rationale behind some of the

gear choices and equipment decisions that you made for this day. So this big day of yours was just

this past Saturday. And why don't you tell us a bit about what you were up to, what the objective was?

So the idea with the objective is what we've kind of been calling in my group of ski

mountaineering friends, the Torrey's Peak Triple Crown or the Tori's 10K or the Tori's Triple,

something like that. You know, for years we've been skiing in this sort of Grays and Torrey's Peak zone in the front range of Colorado,

which is this beautiful basin with two large 14ers, Gray's Peak and Torrey's Peak.

Tori's Peak happens to be one of the best ski mountaineering peaks in the front range.

There's lines off of all different sides of it and a lot of different really cool variety on the peak.

So several years ago, this kind of idea popped into our heads of like, hey, you know, there's

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