Day 18 awesome

Yup, it was that simple, today was awesome, no more, no less, just awesome and that is the top and bottom of it. The figures speak for themselves, we have had 35 cms in the last 24 hours and 52 cms in the last 48. The base is up somewhere around 180 cms and the coverage is fantastic.

It started snowing some time in the night and by the morning a significant accumulation was evident. Driving to the hill was very interesting as a large number of people seemed to think that the sign saying "snow chains or snow tires required beyond this point" at the base of the hill really said "have a go with your front wheel drive summer tires and see if you can get stuck half way up ski hill road" - morons. We managed to avoid the carnage and got up just before 9 but I undersatnd that not long after the line up was back to the town and it took over an hour to get to the hill. On the plus side it gave us some uncontested early tracks.

It snowed until well after lunch , sometimes quite hard. We went to the Old Side as obviously on a big powder morning like today the Old Side triangle was going to be the only thing open.We looped Boomerang (deep and untracked on the left) Cedar Ridge  (twice) which was also awesome powder, Linda's, King Fir and Bear Chutes, all of which were filled in and with loads of untracked lines if you were prepared to work.

The reason we had been on the Old Side was that we had heard that the White Pass lift was closed. As the word came to us that White Pass was open so we migrated to the New Side. Lift Line was as soft and deep as I can remember it. For the rest of the morning we played about in Knot Chutes, Surprise Trees and Anaconda Glades because Currie Bowl was closed from the top. No real problem as everywhere was good and getting better as the snow continued to fall.

In the afternoon we went back to the New Side to find that Currie was open. We had a couple of fruitless runs down the left of Currie Powder as they had posted a notice that the traverse into Skdive was open - it wasn't. We went back to Anaconda far chutes for some more runs which were much more fun than the heavily gladed chutes of 1 and 2. Somewhere in there I had a couple of traverses into Knot Chutes which were great and exits through Bootleg Glades which were also fun but twiggy.

Towards the end of the day I linked up with a buddy and we tried Triple Trees for the first time this year which were mostly untouched and thigh deep all the way down with all of the dead fall covered. As Skydive was closed we missed out on that for the final run but left the hill via Tight Knot, Anaconda 2 and Bootleg Glades - not a bad finale.

Temps are falling and it is about -10 on the deck as I write this. Today was supposed to be the break between two weather systems with more snow over the next three days - the world is supposed to end on Friday, give me three more days of this powder and that's ok by me.