What Is Better Than Corn?

So here I am doing one more report before vacation, as Andy was not out there today. It was another fine and festive day at Alpine Meadows, being a gorgeous spring morning, and the last day of teams for the season. Locker Room 3 was so full of costumes this morning, I felt like I should have been handing out candy!

The good news is that there was a pretty solid freeze overnight, especially on the lower mountain. It took a bit longer than usual for things to thaw out this morning. It was a good morning for practicing long powerslides on the icy groomers. Up top, things were much quicker to soften, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I noticed some rocks showing through at the top of Sunspot this morning, which means it won’t be groomed much longer.

Otherwise, everything was pretty much the same as yesterday for ski conditions. Probably the biggest reason to have a report today is to give a heads up about the winds tomorrow and into Tuesday:

Closer to the surface, an increase of cloud cover will be
accompanied by 700mb wind speeds increasing to 40-50 knots which
will nudge Sierra ridge gusts to 80-100 mph. These gusty ridge
winds will persist through early Tuesday

So Monday and Tuesday may be challenging for skiing, as Roundhouse or TLC may be the top of the mountain…may be, not for sure. Worth checking the app before you commit.

So what is better than corn? Salted corn. We watched that perfect smoothness for the last three days on the Yellow groomer, which was closed to the public for race training. Sadly for the last two days, it remained closed in the afternoons. But today, we were in the right place at the right time and saw the ropes being wound up. So we said “one more lap!” and headed back up Roundhouse and rushed back to Yellow. Some nice coach gave us the green light to ski Yellow and it was fantastic. Definitely it was the run of the day. I have not skied perfect salted corn like that since the last time I summer skied the glacier at Mount Hood. That was a good memory to end on if I am missing a week of skiing…Te veo la proxima semana!