"This is madness." "Madness? This is STRATA!!!"

Strata is pretty much the greatest breakfast food of all time as long as you plan on dying young. It's basically bread pudding for breakfast.  At my request, Katie made it with sausage, mushroom, shallots and monterey jack cheese. Although it takes a while to bake, it can be prepped the night before and left in the fridge.

The night before we went all out. Grilled steaks with caramelized onions and blue cheese butter, sauteed baby spinach with garlic and lemon and smashed potatoes. First, a word on the blue cheese butter. It's exactly what it sounds like (plus some parsley) and once you've had something like this on steak, there's no going back. Now, the smashed potatoes: these things are a brilliant combination of crispy french fry on the outside and mashed potato on the inside.  

April 29 - Bridger Bowl Deepness

It seems that Bridger always get a huge storm after the ski area shuts down. This year 42" fell in 48 hours. I dragged Katie out bed with promises of going out to breakfast after. Unfortunately, the rest of Bozeman had the same idea. As we skinned up, we saw lots of natural avalanche activity and chose a route that was both mellow (i.e. not steep enough to avalanche) and not in a major slide path (so no one else could bury us). As it happened, we saw a skier tirgger a small avalanche that came close to a skier below. Anyway, it had warmed up enough that the skiing wasn't epic, but whatever. Afterwards at breakfast, we were the only dirtbags in ski gear (and quite proud of it).

It was so deep that you couldn't reach the bottom, getting up after a fall was difficult. Katie demonstrates.