Sunday, December 12, 2010

Day 9 a day of two halves

Bit of a weird day today. The morning was an awesome powder day as good as any and the afternoon was a horrible mess as the pineapple express hit us with it's full force bringing rain to all of the hill below the White Pass base.

Overnight there was 12 cms of fresh reported on the hill and as this measure was taken at about 5 am I guess that we had 20 cms of fresh by first turn and a base of well over 120 cms. On the way to the hill temps were -2, snow was falling and we were all pumped up for a maximum powder day - even had our own private snow plough in front of us all the way to the hill.

We went to the old side in continuing snow and just had an awesome morning chasing the powder all over the areas off the Boomerang chair. Cedar bowl was closed at the top but open from Alpine way downwards so we could drop into Cedar ridge pretty well anywhere from mid Alpine Way to King Fir. Actually King Fir was skiable for the first time this year and after a few turns through the bushes it was seriously deep all the way to the bottom.

Other great skiing was Boom bowl, Boom Ridge, Linda's, Buck Shot, in fact the whole Boom area. The way back from Cedar was always through Kangaroo ( 5 times making the YTD Roo count 17) and the Roo was great deep snow. In summary we had a great morning in super deep powder all over Boom and Cedar Ridge.

About 1 the snow at the base changed to rain and started to move up the hill just as was forecast. After lunch we headed up to White Pass and stayed up there all afternoon looping Surprise Trees, Highlne Trees, Milky Way Trees, the Gun bowl, and other assorted bits. Even though the snow seemed to be coming down white the surface became very heavy but with so few people around it was lots of untracked powder (?).

Finished with a rip down the third chute of Anaconda which was so heavy that when it sloughed out I had to ski real hard to miss what was an express train of snow following me down. Came off the hill down Diamond Back for the first time this year which was a good surface and clear of alders but being below the rain line it was like skiing on rice pudding.

Beer in the Griz bar where we agreed that no matter how ugly the hill looked in the rain it was going to look a lot uglier when the temps drop and the un groomed snow re freezes.

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