Knowledge Is Good

The banner headlining the app and the Palisades Tahoe website this morning declared “Powder Alert: 7 inches of new snow!” You don’t have to have much knowledge to know that today was not going to be a powder day, especially without the top of the mountain open. In the morning lineup at Roundhouse, Ski Patrol felt strongly enough about it to stop near the corral and announce that conditions were extremely icy and consider staying only on the groomed runs. They were right, it was indeed very firm when the lift started rolling. They even had roped off access to some of the steeper north facing terrain off of Sympathy Face. For most guests, that was the right thing to do. (Eventually the wording of the banner was changed to include “icy conditions”, likely due to encouragement from Patrol.)

Knowledge is good. – Emil Faber

Then there’s those of us that have skied hundreds, or even thousands of days at Alpine Meadows. Knowledge is good. Today was a super fun day, as long as you knew enough to judge which aspects would soften first, and where to go from there. After a few quick groomer laps we found ourselves testing the usual suspects. As it turned out, as things softened, we had an “insta-corn” day at Alpine Meadows. Usually spring corn snow takes 3 or 4 freeze and thaw cycles to get decent corn status. When you get a rain on snow event followed by a sunny warm day, you get insta-corn.

All of the sunnier aspects off of Yellow were good to go by 10am. As time moved on, more areas got soft enough for velvety turns, as long as you could follow where the sun was moving. Honestly I probably could have never left Roundhouse today, but eventually I felt obligated to checkout Sherwood. Sherwood was a bit more of a mixed bag. I caught a bad case of the stickies as I dropped into Robin Hood and found the same sticky snow on the main groomer. But just a little ways off the beaten path we found more delightful insta-corn, that almost reached that rare phenomenon of “Crinkle Corn”, where the surface crust breaks as you ski it and it goes skittering across the crust, making that crinkly sound. It looked like people were having great fun over on South Face. Hunger was getting the best of me, so we took a quick trip down the delightfully smooth Shuttle Cornice and Expert Shortcut to head in for lunch.

After lunch, I felt obligated to check out Scott. Depending on your perspective, we were either too early or too late. It was  a no brainer that Gentian Gully would be closed, and that limits access to the Promised Land. A patroller was evaluating Scott Chute as we rode up and it still looked a tad firm. It also had quite a bit of avalanche debris through the choke and under Juniper Face. Both Ridge and Bobby’s looked pretty clumpy and not quite corny at the one o’clock hour, so we headed to Standard…smooth as butter. Scott chute opened shortly afterwards.

We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the western facing slopes of Gunners as the sun moved to that side…butter smooth insta-corn there too. I could have skied bell to bell today.

Summit did not open today. Hopefully the east wind will remain below the threshold tomorrow.

Chris at the top of Kangaroo

Paul planning his Kangaroo slalom course

The upper mountain is spackled

Patrol took precautions this morning to keep those without knowledge off of Sympathy this morning.

The ledge of snow and a buried taco truck (photo from Monday)

Click on any picture above to see biggerized versions. The mountain looks amazing right now. There is so much snow. Just about every rock and cliff band is covered, as are most of the small trees. The Taco Truck is buried, as is the Ice Bar. It’s now about three feet up from the Sun Deck to the snow surface. I’m not sure that was a part of the master plan!

Right now we should get Thursday and Friday as sunny days with more corn skiing. A chance of showers moves into the forecast for Saturday. And then we return to winter again. You probably should NOT look at either the 6-10 day outlook or the 8-14 day outlooks, as both call for both colder and wetter than average weather. As for the next storm, it looks like the next storm brings 1-3 feet of snow, mostly Monday and Tuesday. Let’s enjoy this short spring break while we can!