Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Day 41 no new snow and still pretty tough

Now you need to understand that the coverage is still good despite the very skinny base of 140 cms and even with no new snow there is still plenty of off piste skiing (how European) to be had it's just that it is all pretty hard tough skiing being a mix of tracked up crud, hard skied in bumps or some untracked rain crust. Suits me but I can see that this is not everyone's idea of a good day's skiing.

It was -6 on the way to the hill and -3 on the way back so things are finally warming up. It was overcast all day with the conditions at White Pass about as socked in as I can remember them and very cold in the moist wind chill despite the mercury saying it was about -6. We had a little valley snow during the day which was nothing to get excited about as it must have amounted at most to 1 cm on top of the big three but then given what we have been having , hey - let's get excited.

We went to the Old Side for the morning and unsurprisingly found that with nothing having happened to change conditions over night the conditions hadn't really changed - funny that. We skied around New Lift Line, Bear, Cedar Ridge, King Fir, Linda's, Boomerang and Boom Ridge twice. Not much to say in that the snow remained hard and the bumps were tough but taking an edge. The skiing was not the easiest in the world but quite acceptable as long as you paid attention. We did look into Kangaroo but decided it was still too bushy to be fun. A drop into the tight chute into the Gulch was much enlivened by a snowboarder deciding to show us how I was done and stacking it in the 6 ft hole in the bottom of the creek bed which we could have told him was there and that was why we were skiing it a bit circumspect - I think he got the message. So we went to lunch having skied all over the Old Side and found it to be hard chunky bumps just about taking and edge.

In the afternoon I went to the New Side and dropped down Lift Line all afternoon which was skiing nicely with some blow in over the ridge line. The log drop in Big Bang was still there and I tended to air it over that on every drop just to make for rather more fun lines down to White Pass. It was always going to be a series of loops out to the big three for the rest of the afternoon and that is exactly how it panned out -
Decline - still skiing so mellow for most of the way down with big bumps in the top and great freeriding the rest of the way. Last few turns just have to be good old fashioned gorilla turns, not much style but some effective grunting to get the skis round in the rain crust.
Stag Leap - crusty in the trees and in the first section but then becoming really nice free riding in the mid section. As always, very twiggy and very crusty in the lower pitch.
Skydive - like yesterday, great for three quarters of the run then crusty twigs in the bottom.
Decline - as before.
White Pass loop - to kill time I took a loop back down Highline. It's worth mentioning here just how socked in it was at the top of White Pass. Even the cat track was real leap of faith and the light didn't clear until at least half way down to the load.
And so we got to 4 o'clock and it was time for Skydive again. The only participants were me, Rod and our snowboarding buddy which was no bad thing as it meant that we could hit it pretty quick from top to bottom. A few beers afterwards and now we are out to be treated to a meal by our current guests so that should be good, Bridge Bistro is looking favourite at the moment. Some flurries in the forecast so fingers crossed.

No comments:

Post a Comment