Day 88 out the other side of awesome

Oh yes, today was almost as good as January 17th and that is saying something. On that subject I heard a great joke last night - How do you tell if someone skied Fernie on January 17th - you don't have to, they will tell you.

This won't be a very long report as we have had a totally awesome day followed by far too much beer for me to make any kind of sense at all.

It snowed another 40 cms overnight on top of the 34 cms we had yesterday and it must have puked another 26 cms during the day and it is still snowing now. It has been snowing for 3 days and maybe it will never stop snowing ever again - at least we are promised another 12 cms overnight and that should be good enough.

It was -8 when we arrived at the hill and -7 when we left and I doubt that the temps got up much during the day during the constant snowfall. Not much was open. On the New Side Currie bowl was closed so we just had Timber and Siberia. On the Old Side it was no Lizard bowl or Cedar bowl so it was just about only the Old Side triangle with Bear to Cedar Ridge being all that was available. Of course the snow that was available on either side was almost a metre deep, deep and totally awesome.

We went to the New Side and going up Timber found that White Pass was delayed so we had a run down Black Cloud which was deep, deep powder with over the head face shots cutting out visability and breathing and was tottaly awesome - assume these were the conditions everywhere unless stated to the contrary.

With so much shut we looped White Pass through various Knot chutes and Surprise trees where we just had to spread out to keep getting fresh tracks. We had hoped for Anaconda but when it became clear that it wasn't going to open we started to loop to the bottom through Triple Trees. We should really rename them Quintruple Trees as after the third section through the trees we did two more sections (down on to Summer Trail under Timber chair and then off that trail through the lower trees) in normal circumstances these would be too tight and steep to be fun but in today's waist deep snow you just pointed your skis through the tightest sections in the fall line and let it go.

After lunch we went to the Old Side and did a couple of drops of Cedar Ridge (Ridge right and King Fir) which were great skiing with all the crowds going back to - well, wherever they came from. Two returns through Kangaroo had it skiing about as mellow as I can remember in deep powder. We went back to the New Side via Boom which was predictably deep and soft.

On the New Side we tried Siberia Ridge and although it had been tracked in the lower section it was like a deep terrain park only lightly tracked where you could fly big air knowing there was a soft landing and again the snow was making breathing difficult with continuous over the head face shots.

With Currie closed Skydive was off the agenda so we finished with two loops of Triple Trees catching the final White Pass chair at 1 minute to closing bell. In the trees it was alway possible to find fresh lines somewhere and these always resulted in huge face shots. A fantastic finish to a fantastic day.

Far too many beers with very pumped up buddies in the Griz bar. Best of all at least 60% of the hill has reamained closed and tomorrow they are calling for a cold bluebird day before we go back into another weather cycle. Tomorrow could see an awesome day of the type normally only seen in ski movies and with the crowds all gone - I can't wait but it will have to be an early night.