Saturday, December 19, 2009

Day 17 and it was surprisingly awesome

This morning I thought I had made a mistake and we hadn't got away with it in this warm cycle. It was raining on the deck and we had +1 and the town looked pretty ugly as a result of rain and ice. Driving to the hill the rain turned to very heavy wet snow but at least it was snow.

Given yesterday's ugly conditions the only game in town was to go high to White Pass. This worked as obviously a lot of the usual powder chasers weren't around having decided that the conditions didn't warrent it. We went up Timber Chair and by the time we reached the top we were in full on winter snow conditions with low viz and snow coming down so hard that it was filling in out tracks and gave us powder albeit very heavy all over the hill.

During the day the snow line moved up the hill to about one third up the mountain and around 2 in the afternoon it petered out all together. Temps stayed at or near zero all day. The lower mountain remains a bit of a nightmare.

So we arrived in White Pass with very poor viz but about 20 cms of heavy powder all untracked. We cut the first traverse out to Surprise and after a quick debate on whether or not to drop Anaconda we ripped Surprise Trees which was truely awesome. Next time round we were amazed to find Anaconda still untouched so we dropped the near chutes in deep untracked powder. Next time round there were still hardly any tracks in Anaconda so we hike the hump and dropped the next set of chutes which were real tight but untracked and very deep.

The rest of the morning was spent in 1-2-3's, Anaconda, and Surprise all of which had many untracked lines even by the end of the morning. Each time we arrived in the lower part of Currie bowl we took the way out through Bootleg Glades which meant that we ripped through it about 7 times all of which were great but with some rather technical stuff through the alders to get out on to Gilmar Trail.

In the Afternoon we got the word from Patrol that the low traverse out of Currie had opened as had Mitchy chutes so we just looped thae new side going through Mitchy's each time. First time going to Sydive we got too low and ended up in Currie Creek. Not all bad as it was untracked and thigh deep all the way down. next time we made Skydive which was awesome at the top. With the snow so closely following the ground terrain it was like having your own personal terrain park which you could free ride with skis in the air more than they were on the ground. The bottom was described by the patrol on the warning signs as marginal presumably because they are not allowed to say f***ing awful. Very tough ski out in rain crust but the top made it all worth while. Last run through Stag Leap with much the same results.

All in all an awesome day which we didn't expect. Outlook still marginal but we are hoping to avoid the R word. With luck we could get more powder high up and with the lower mountain setting up as the temps dropped it wouldn't take much to convert even the lower hill into pretty good conditions.

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