King's Hill Cabin

Two weeks ago the family, the Netburns and the Brandons headed up to the Forest Service Cabin at King's Hill, high atop the Belt Mountains in Central Montana. The reason we were in the Belts was to ski at Showdown and the cabin is literally 300 yards from the parking lot.

The Belts have gotten hammered with snow and their are rumors circulating around my students that Showdown is in the top 5 top snow ski resorts this winter (I'm skeptical). Needless to say there is 50 to 60 inches of snow up at the cabin. On Friday night we had a bit of a struggle to even find the cabin as darkness, light snow and being tired from a long drive compounded to limit our ability to see much of anything. Eventually the cabin was found, the wood stove fired up followed by the inevitable wait for the stove to heat up the cabin.

I snapped these couple of pics as we waited. I wrapped up in my old and trusted Big Red. Folks kept making fun of me for wearing big read and all the joking reminded me of the story of how Big Red came into my life. It was in November of 1998 that I was driving from Virginia to Montana to take the first job I ever held in Montana, a gig at the Aspen Youth Alternatives. As my little Saturn station wagon motored across Kansas and into Colorado during the drive out I quickly came to the realization that I was going to need a fundamentally better winter coat than the one I had. I stopped at Sierra Trading Post in Cheyenne, Wyoming and came across this rather large, overstuffed Marmot synthetic down jacket. I remember I asked a saleslady what the ideal use for such a jacket was and she told me (and I think I remember this verbatim) "It would be good if you had an ice climber on belay and you were just standing around". I of course had no idea what that meant, but it certainly sounded badass so I bought the jacket.

At some point that jacket was dubbed Big Red. Most mornings you can find me walking around the frog ponds in Lewistown wearing big red as I walk Salsa. Its been a good Montana jacket even though I have never belayed an ice climber in it.