Saturday, December 27, 2014

Day 23 some crowds but some awesome new snow

We confidently expected today to be one of the busiest days of the year but it didn't seem to turn out that way. There were crowds sure enough but they seemed to be sticking to the core groomed ski areas, and of course the day lodge. My buddy reckons that the locals were put off with the idea of the big crowds and stayed away so as a result the kind of places we like to ski were less crowded than on an average weekend.

Overnight they reported 7 cms of fresh which seemed about right. Rather unexpectedly it continued to snow all day so that my guess would be that by close we had another 10 cms. The forecast is for another 20 cms overnight and it certainly is still snowing so tomorrow could be pretty spectacular. The effect of all this was that we had good untracked snow to find in the morning but even as the day wore on we had great fill in to ski on and a base that was always getting bigger and softer. By the end of the day we were skiing without touching the bottom in most places.

On the way to the hill it was -5 and on the way back it was -6 so temps stayed pretty constant. Up higher it was a few degrees cooler and of course up Polar peak it was brutal as always. Viz was generally ok over the hill but socked in anywhere around the White Pass top and above. The runs we hit today were -
Decline - first tracks with deep snow all the way down.
Cougar Glades - third track in but the other soon disappeared leaving great untracked down to the trail. We cut left into Stag Leap and as I said yesterday were surprised just how high up the cut in was leaving a long run down with only one track in front.
Polar Peak/Skydive - no viz up Polar and some icy skiing below the chair on the way down. Skydive was soft and deep with only a couple of tracks ahead and nothing down the skiers right side, great skiing.
Lone Fir/Easter - The chute was little technical but the fan underneath was just awesome deep powder and even Easter was getting ok deep snow.
Polar Peak,/Decline/Window Chutes -This time on Polar we tracked round to the fence by Pappa Bear and had the most amazing soft flat deep skiing on wind sifted snow. Decline was still quite good in the top section with some lightly tracked powder in the top. Window chutes were just spectacular with us having to beat out our sloughs in the choke to avoid being taken out.
Polar Peak/ Secret Chutes/ Spinal Tap - again in Polar we hit the soft snow on the far fence in the chutes, when it is that soft and deep and flat you simply don't need to be able to see. We dropped the newly gladed area at the top of Skydive into Easter right side and had some great deep untracked lines. We cut hard right into Spinal Tap which was not that easy to find but the upper chute was good deep snow and the lower part got a bit technical jumping in and out of the creek bed but was still some pretty nice untracked snow.

I think I may have left out a couple of Cougar Glade loops and certainly a drop down Stag Leap which was great skiing but a little twiggy lower down - trouble with doing this blog in the evening after a few beers is that the memory is not all it could be. The truth is that runs were all great with snow filling in on the tracked powder making for some great conditions. Last run we hiked out to Mitchy Chutes for the second time in the day and had a good soft deep drop. Every return to White Pass other than those two had been via Lift Line which was tracked but ok skiing.

The last rip down Skydive was spectacular with so much new snow that you could just rip it like groomer  even if this did mean that your skis were in the air more than they were on the ground. Five of us made the trip tonight so the club is growing. After a day like that we just had to have too many beers in the Griz Bar and look forward to even more good skiing if the weather forecasts can be believed - pauses for laughter to subside.

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