It’s been 2 weeks since I skied last and that was far too long. We’ve been planning a trip to The Nipple, off of Highway 88, for a couple of weeks. The final gates opened on Blue Lakes Road just last Friday. We were pleasantly surprised to find the snow was still there, even in a very dry year. As we have found in other areas, elevations above 9000′ had a relatively normal snow year. There’s several chutes around the area that get heavily wind loaded with snow over the winter, meaning snow here often lasts into July.
The cool part about skiing The Nipple is that there usually is not much of an approach hike required. In a good year, you can drive within 50 yards of the snow and start boot packing. Alas, this was not a quite a normal year. The east facing patches were burnt out at the lower end. That did not matter to us, as we had done a recon mission to the dam of Lower Blue Lake, where we could get a clear view of the backside patches.
Our first destination was the Boreal Patch on the backside, which in a normal year is longer than any run at Boreal. This year it was still longer than the patch offered at Saturday’s Summer Shred. The pitch is mellow, but there were no crowds or liftlines. Dogs are also allowed on the slopes, much to the delight of our golden retriever, Rossi. We skied all three patches on the backside before heading back to the frontside patches.
The uppermost patch on the east side always offers some of the best snow conditions for the summer. It did not fail us Sunday. The snow surface was smooth corn with just a ripple of cups. We did a couple of laps here before making the tricky exit to the lower patches. There’s usually four full chutes to yo-yo on the way back to the car, but this year only one of them looked safe enough to ski. The others had a lot of running water and air pockets under the snow due to the recent heat wave. The last chute took us to within 1/4 mile of the car. Unfortunately that quarter of a mile of hiking resulted in a huge number of mosquito bites. Evidently there has not been a hard freeze in the area for quite awhile.
Sadly, I missed Boreal’s Summer Shred on Saturday. (Miles over at Snowbrains.com has some nice photos and write-up on the day.) But I think we had a better ski experience at The Nipple on Sunday. Hoping to get out to the Highland Lakes area this week for more skiing.
