I happen to love skiing more than many people I know, yet there are still days where I ask myself “What am I doing here?” Still, skiing does beat working, and many other things. It just was not a stellar ski day.
At closing time, the temperatures at mid-mountain were around 75 degrees. No, it did not freeze last night. The snow was rather sticky just about everywhere. Many people were one and done. Andy lasted a whole 4 laps. I “stuck” it out for 9 total laps because I was with a ski buddy I have not skied with all year.
Just about everything off of the top of the mountain was poor this morning. I expect Sunspot to be mushy on warm days, but today it skied in slow motion. We tried Wolverine and had to push to get back up the hill to the lift tower near the Face. My commentary was “That was a drag.” We even tried the Palisades area, where you pretty much had to push to go down hill. My friend, Mark 2.0 summed it up as “That sucked”
It wasn’t all bad. The run of the day was D8, which was slushtastic, steep and reasonably fast. The only problem was that still left you with the trudge out of Wolverine Bowl and back to Summit. The lower mountain did actually ski better as there has been more melt and freeze cycles at the lower elevation. Dance Floor and Charity both had decent corn snow. It’s just that you had to do something off of Summit to get there. I would have paid extra to be able to just ski Roundhouse today!
I’m guessing there is a wax that works. It was not Hertel Super Hot Sauce, nor Toko Yellow, nor the black graphite race wax. There were some people moving faster and I would be willing to bet that they were using some wax alternative. It also really helps to stay on edge, reducing the amount of base in contact with the snow. The only problem was building some speed so you could rail your turns! I know I will be out again tomorrow testing a few more alternatives. We are skiing…and that is what matters.
Ski Patrol finally closed off access to everything that could take you down toward Weasel this morning. The rope line started near Terry’s Return and continued on along Dance Floor past Ladies Slalom. That made me happy I got to do some final exploration on Gunner’s knob yesterday. One thing is certain, it would have been far easier to just close the whole mountain, and that did not happen. We are super grateful to be skiing at Alpine still. The warm temps are sticking around for the foreseeable future, with only minimal cooling next week. Get in those last ski days while you can because the melt is on!
And this is the problem with those spring powder days like we had on Monday…you gain a few good laps, but it can take days for the corn conditions to recover. New snow in late spring sucks, literally.