Here’s The Thing…

Ski conditions were great, at least on piste, again this morning. Jeremy and his grooming crew are keeping things dialed in with a lot of wall to wall grooming. So for at least the morning session, you can find some really nice turns on some smooth corduroy. Given the sugary condition of the snow, it’s not all that long lasting. As we have been saying the key is to take the road less travelled.

Off piste the conditions are great if you need some teeth loosened. I saw one person on South Face this afternoon and one person taking on D7 this morning. Everyone else was in groomer zoomer mode.

One thing to note was that we saw race fencing being set up along Kangaroo Ridge today, extending from the bottom of the Face on downward. So that will be eliminating the Sandy’s Corner Bypass route, maybe tomorrow, maybe into the weekend. That will make Werners and Sandy’s Corner all the more busy as we head into the weekend. Yes, Friday is the new Saturday. It’s an area I will likely avoid. You may want to as well, unless you’re there to see the race. A quick check of the official website does not list what kind of race is happening.

Sometime around noon, Summit finally did go on wind hold due to the northeast wind. Anytime you roll up to Summit in the morning and chairs are flipping up, you know that a wind hold is a possibility. Evidently, people left Summit and went to Sherwood. The Sherwood groomer was relatively very busy around 1 pm, with virtually nobody skiing off piste. Conditions were also not primo. I have noticed that if too many people go to Sherwood too soon, everything gets scraped off and you get sugar piles on firm pack. Then those sugar piles never soften. The rate of softening just can’t keep up with the amount of people. One and done at Sherwood today.

Scott on the other hand offered some primo corn conditions on Ridge and Bobby’s in the early afternoon. We did several laps there. The return to Scott is not so great, as the wrong sun exposure leads to sugar on firm pack with too many Jerrys lead footing it back to the lift on East Creek.

Things Will Remain Dry For Now

The storm for early next week is basically a non-starter at this point, bringing like a 3% chance for four flakes of snow. Reading over the comments over at WeatherWest.com this afternoon, user “Nathan” sums it up with this graphic:

The deep blue represents the troughing that the models were seeing just four days ago. It would have been an awesome storm. Now they show that trough digging into the Rockies, creating a very dry inside slider scenario. This also means that we are potentially going to see another round of very cold northeast winds Monday through Wednesday next week. We might even get some cloud cover too. That is not ideal. I mentioned to my wife that it was a good opportunity for a spur of the moment trip to Mexico, alas we both have medical appointments next week that took months of scheduling.

Beyond that inside slider, the rest of the 16 day model run continues to be dry. The weather nerds are starting to look for a March miracle, having given up on February. I have not completely written off February yet.

Here’s The Thing

Yesterday I came on pretty strong about that new sign proclaiming the new name of “Alpine Lodge” instead of Alpine Meadows out front. As it turns out, I’m not the only one that really thinks it’s stupid. Many people shared their disappointment today. On the bright side, when that Philadelphia Eagles logo appeared, at least it was not in the colors of the Denver Broncos. So we do have that.

We have to remember that these decisions are being made by people in a valley approximately two miles away, or in another state approximately 1,000 miles away. They are laser focused on one thing, and that is bringing more tourists to the resort formerly known as SVAM, and then extracting as much money as possible from them. They have not a care in the world about us people that have been coming to Alpine Meadows for most of our lives and clog up the mountain with our need to ski. Just to be clear here, I am specifically talking about the rebranding effort at Alpine Meadows.

But the people that keep the mountain running, from the mountain manager down through the mountain ops people, ski patrol, lift operations, food service people, mountain hosts, coaches and instructors, et al. – they do care about our mountain experience. They are making it work every day. They make it work when the snow is a month old. They make it work when the same crush of visitors happens every weekend. They make it work when east winds create all sorts of havoc with operations plans. They even make it work when they really don’t like the new name of the mountain either. So today, I raise my 805 Cerveza to you all. Thank you all and see you tomorrow.