Day 86 much better than we thought it might be

The forecast for today was no sun, rain in the afternoon and temps rising during the day to about + 6. In the event we had wet snow to start with and the rain line rising to about one third of the way up the hill by mid afternoon and precip fairly good off and on all day.

It was one of those days when we came to the hill with low expectations because of the fact that loads of sun yesterday and no sun today probably meant more than our fair share of re frozen crud with no significant new snow would be evident. The story was more than a little different.

With the snow/rain mix falling all day we hit Lizard bowl just to see how soft things might be. A wide swing into Easter showed the answer to be "not very" and we regrouped to think again. A change of plan saw us skiing all morning on the Old side, first dropping Linda's run which was harder than we thought then 5 different ways down Cedar ridge/ King Fir which were hard at first but then revealed a kinder side as things softened, the low snow turned to rain. All 4 loops we came back through Kangaroo which was quite hard as usual but softening as the morning worn on so that by the late morning the bumps were soft and almost friendly. Somewhere in there we managed a couple of loops back through Boom bowl and down through Bear chutes which like every where else had gone softer and easier in the warm snow.

By lunch it was clear that the rising rain line had effectively made the Old side redundant so we hit the New side. We tried the Gun bowl as it looked ok and found it was ugly with no light and then on to Surprise trees which were tight with some new snow but just about ok. After that experiment we decided that everything that had melted and then been covered by the dust on crust wouldn't be worth doing. We then decide (rightly) that we would hit everything that had been hard yesterday and therefore would not have melted today.

We had great runs through Stag Leap, Secret chutes and finally Decline all of which were untracked at the top, good skiing in the middle and soft to taking an edge low down. We had first tracks, if you can call it that, in all three pitches. Not awesome but getting on toward accptable by the end of the afternooon.

In summary a much better day than we thought we would get. This evening they are calling for more snow tomorrow so we live in hopes.