Day 54 and another realy ugly day's skiing.

First of all apologise for the late posting of this report as I have been out with my buddies for wings night down the pub. As always on these occasions there is a supplementary apology for possible memory failure and poor spelling due to far too much beer but here goes ....

Just like yesterday it froze over night with no new snow and on the way to the hill it was -3 and few degrees lower up the hill. During the day things warmed up to about +6 up the mountain and about +8 at the base. The conditions were nowhere near as bluebird  as yesterday with a bit of haze covering the sun which became solid cloud cover by afternoon. the result was that we had the same boiler plate start as yesterday but it did not soften as quickly in the direct sunlight. The hazy sun and atmospheric warming did give us some softer conditions in places but at no time did we get the uncontrollable mush slides that dogged us yesterday and caused most of the hill to be closed.

We went to the Old Side and found pretty well everything ugly hard and icy and so were restricted to groomers around Bear, North Ridge, Emily's, Lower Linda's. Cruiser and Cedar Centre. The only place we found any softening was on Sunny Side shoulder where we took two trips down, the first a bit crunchy but the second starting to get to the point where it took an edge. This got us to late morning with only boiler plate groomers to show for our troubles for the most part so we hit out to the New Side in search of something better.

On the New Side we dropped Puff as Lift line was closed and found it rock hard icy tracked up bumps and it remained this way all day for the next 5 times that I tried it. We looped the White Pass core four times as Polar Peak was closed and found that skiing in the Gun bowl was very mellow soft snow and Highline was hard and icy - the Knot Chutes and the Idiot Traverse were closed at that time and even though they opened later in the day I have to say I was not tempted. Our run to base at lunch was through Concussion which had softened in the top to crisp sugary snow although the run out through Gilmar trail was very twiggy and sketchy.

After lunch we just looped the New Side several times from Currie Creek to Concussion and found for the most part firm sugary skiing with soft patches which was ok in the context of today. The best exit was to avoid Gilmar on Lower Barracuda where the coverage was better and the bumps were at least taking an edge.

I thought long and hard about going out to Skydive for the final run as it had never been in the sun all day and by my judgement was going to be very tough going. Tradition got the better of me and I took a lone journey (no one else was stupid enough to try it) out to Skydive. Things were pretty much as expected with hard ugly boiler plate in the top, mixed conditions in the mid section and some semi melted crud in the bottom pitch. Probably the toughest run of the year for me so far and as such really good challenging fun but so, so hard.

Beers, and then visit friend Rob and Katie (and baby Joseph) before heading to the pub for wings night with more friends - hence the late report. Tomorrow looks like another overnight freeze but without the warm day time temps to melt it so things could be even more challenging tomorrow.