The conflux of a significant powder day with a Saturday may not be every skier’s dream, but for much of my life I was a weekend skier, and they deserve powder too. The early morning tweet announced that 9 inches of new snow had fallen at the top of the mountain, just minutes after I looked at the NOAA Remote Data page and saw 5 inches of new snow was reported at the base. Being a weekend, I prepped minimally at home and jumped in the car to beat traffic.
Was it busy? Yes it was, being a weekend. The weird thing is, the powder day last Tuesday seemed more busy than today. It was Ski-Skate week though. The “all parking lots are full” tweet did not even arrive until nearly lunch time. Still, when the lifts rolled at 9am, the lines were out of the corrals at Summit, Roundhouse and TLC. Traffic did spread across the mountain pretty quickly, and only Summit maintained much of a line for most of the day.
As expected, it was typical boot top powder day conditions, meaning generally not bottomless. This powder, being slightly denser than last weeks, was a bit more supportive underfoot, making things feel slightly less scratchy underneath. Skiing lower angle terrain, and sticking to smoother terrain generally lead to better results. Then again if you know where the new snow tends to settle in deeper, that was really the place to be today.
We noticed several people making poor choices today. There was the guy that came flying out of the trees onto Scotty’s Beam, immediately finding the snow barely covering the large dirt and rock patch that was there yesterday. Fortunately it looked like he only suffered a bruised ego. A number of people came flying onto Sherwood Face carrying way too much speed, only to find those grey patches were actually large icy moguls under the powder. Nine inches of new snow is not a complete reset folks!
What was the best today? I heard several votes for Gentian Gully, and another couple for Estelle. I imagine that High Traverse also offered up some nice turns. I’m quite happy with the stashes I pursued, those kinds that we never talk about here. I’m generally pretty careful to look over my shoulder and make sure nobody is following me when I am heading to my favorite places.
Once the hunt for powder was becoming more difficult after lunch, I settled for some hot laps cruising off of Roundhouse, where at least today you could venture off piste just about anywhere and find softer turns. It was a great day, even for a weekend. Arrive early, eat lunch off schedule and leave early to minimize your stress and maximize your fun.
After a couple of days of dry runs in the forecast models, the picture is once again slightly better. There’s no big monster storms in the forecast, but there are some refreshers in the picture through the 16 day model runs. There’s nothing that looks strong enough to really be a game changer yet, but I am not giving up hope just yet either. We’ll keep enjoying what we have, no matter what it looks like.
We ski Alpine week days. We went to Homewood today, as we usually do on weekends, because they are less crowded. The snow report said 12″ at the summit. The NOAA report of snowfall said the same. They did not have 12″ of new snow anywhere on the mountain. More like 4 or 6 at best. It was good even though you bottomed out each turn. Why does Homewood get away with reporting higher snow amounts than they actually have? They do it quite often. I feel I can trust the snow amounts reported at Alpine.
I guess because Homewood has to try harder to get people there?
Did High T open today? Maybe so…maybe not. Honestly, I never bothered with Summit today…