It was a perfect day of May skiing at Alpine Meadows today. You just have to forget that it’s not actually May. But Mother Nature has been about a month ahead of herself for several months now and there seems to be no end to that.
We started the day off with a round of snow golf, which turned out to be hugely popular today. Clearly, my plan for an early arrival was requisite to be in the running for the free visor. We started our game shortly after 9:00 am. Normally we wait for the snow to get sticky, then play the round of golf. I’ll admit that we got impatient and may have committed a faux pas by skipping ahead immediately to the first open hole, #5, ahead of the VIP group. That meant that all of the fairways and greens after crossing Rock Garden were butter smooth groomers with almost no tracks. Still, we managed to run our score into triple digits after 5 holes of play, and moved on to enjoying some skiing. At the end of the day – I still managed to win a round of golf for 2 at RSC. Kudos and thanks to everyone that made it happen at Alpine Meadows.
In the department of actually skiing – all of the usual May lines were skiing well, as expected. The whole corn cycle thing has progressed nicely, so there were very few sticky spots until late in the day. We had great lines today in The Sisters, Palisades, Peter’s Peril and North Peril.
Speaking of May skiing and riding….a couple of Alpine employees seemed to verify today that there will not be any actual May skiing and riding at Alpine Meadows. April 28th looks like it will be the cutoff date for Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley. Looking at the base areas near Summit and Roundhouse, it will take a lot of snow farming to even make that happen. With no significant snowfall more than 4 inches in any recent time, it’s easy to see things going that way. Upper elevations are holding up pretty well. If you like May skiing & riding, we encourage you to get out before the end of April!
Tomorrow’s forecast has cooled a bit, with continued wind expected. A friend had a great quote today, “Even bad bacon is good.” There will be some epic May skiing and riding tomorrow and the season passholder BBQ tomorrow should be great. Now if we can get ABC tomorrow and be able to stay high on the mountain…that would be a #winning day.