The South Fork of the Crystal and the Devil's Punchbowls

(Schofield Backcountry)

I recently took a day off work to run some drops near Crested Butte on the South Fork of the Crystal. I always thought that the only runnable drops on the SF Crystal were the Devil's Punchbowls, but we drove up Schofield Pass from the Crested Butte side and found some great runnable vert in the upper part of the drainage.


At the top of the pass, we were greeted by a clean 12 foot drop into a short pool that moved into a manky lead-in to an 18 foot drop. These were a lot of fun to run, so much that I walked up and did it twice. That's me in the photo above, and my friend Chris Menges below.



After these fun drops, we continued down the SF Crystal to the Devil's Punchbowls. The photo below shows my friend Ethan Passant scouting the landing after the first drop.


The level seemed really high and the lag time between the 2 drops was only a couple seconds, so if you messed up the top drop, there wasn't much time to set up for the second drop. Normally this wouldn't be too much of an issue, but the first drop has a very tricky entry, and if you run the second drop on the wrong side, you drop about 25 feet onto a rock. This whole situation really only appealed to one of the guys in our group, Eric Parker. He was the only one of the four of us to run it, and his line was a little less than pretty...

Eric ended up running the top 30 footer backwards, which resulted in a hard landing and a sketchy recovery. Luckily he was able to pull it together and style the second drop. Big Props to Eric for "sackin' up" and running that thing.