13th April Easter Monday

Day 112 and this was a genuine powder day - well lets not get carried away it wasn't awesome powder but if you count a powder day as one where you make a significant number of turns in untracked snow and quite few of those are turns where you don't scrape the bottom this sure enough was a powder day.
Last night it rained for long perods and the topic of debate in the bars was where, if at all, the rain turned to snow up the hill. The morning revealed a very high snow line on Mount Fernie so we headed to the new side to get the best posssible snow result by skiing the highest parts of the hill. First run down Lift Line was not good with wind crust at the top and rain crust from half way down and to be honest it didn't get much better in there all day.
Weather for the day flicked between snow flurries to sunny periods. In the sun the surfaces softened but then set up as each flurrie passed. The flurries didn't give enough snow to cover
the resetting so as the day went on the crust got worse so that by the end there was some very challenging surfaces but before that we had some great skiing.
From the outset Gun bowl was excellent with untracked powder although only about 5 cms deep - the official report gave 14 cms of new snow and all I can say is that I want a bottle of whatever they were drinking. We spent the whole morning in the Whitepass area working our way across Gun bowl to get fresh tracks each time then working our way back to the lift by a combination of I bowl, Fiery Hornet, under the lift, Highline Trees and other variations. With only a quick break in Lost Boys Cafe for a hot chocky and one of their awesome cookies it was 2 before we were thinking about lunch and that after I had hiked Knot chutes which had opened to the surprise of most of us.
I would had gone to lunch but ran into my buddy Rob and we skied a bit on White pass then found great snow mostly untracked in 123s. We came off the hill through Diamond back as we did all afternoon and found the snow variable with soft surfaces, sometimes with a quite hard crust, and some underlying ungroomed bumps. Next circuit we tried Anaconda and were amazed to find it untracked, deep and soft at just before 3 in the sfternoon - great to see that there was no one on the hill, or at least no one who knew where the good skiing was. Final run off the hill through 123s provided more excellent untracked snow at the very end of the day.
Never tried the old side but reports I got in the Griz bar suggested it wasn't any great shakes as the rain line was just about at the top of Lizard bowl.
More rain/snow called for so we could actually finish on a powder day, how good would that be ?