Sunday, December 18, 2016

Day 17 Warming Up

Well, lets not get carried away, when I say warming up I mean that we are getting temps in the minus teens and not minus 20's as been the case for the last two weeks. Of course we don't want it to warm up too much with all this precip in the forecast as they are already calling for temps later this week that are dangerously close to zero with the associated risk of us being hit by the "R" word as a result.

Today started with the temp on the deck at -15 and with no real overnight snow the base was down to 111 cms and falling. It was overcast and there was a little white dust coming down which was with us on and off all day but which never gave anything that amounted to an accumulation.

The weather feature of the day was the wind and with strong gusts in the valley I guessed that there would be a delay to the start on the hill so I took my time getting there. Like yesterday I arrived at about 10 and also like yesterday I called things dead right. When I arrived only Elk and Deer chairs were running due to the wind up high. This did not give any skiing other than the groomed lower mountain which in my book doesn't really count as skiing. By the time I had booted up and ridden the Elk then Bear and Boomerang chairs were open so we had the whole Old Side. Timber was delayed but as the wind dropped a bit late morning it started up and we had the New Side as well by lunch time.

The wind had sifted the snow around a bit on the Old Side and we found some good untracked sift in most places on the Old Side Triangle - Boom, Boom Ridge, Cedar Ridge, Linda's, Kangaroo (particularly nice and soft) etc. Once again we decided against a skate out to Snake due to the slow running snow but I expect the sift just over the ridge in Redtree would have been pretty nice. In summary the skiing was much the same as the last week - tough tracked up powder with early season hazards made a little better by some new wind sift.

After a late lunch we looped the New Side where the conditions were much the same as the Old but with some evidence of wilder winds and some bigger wind banks of sift, particularly in the Surprise Trees area. Anaconda was very good all across but specially in the far right chutes and the fans underneath where the wind sift had built up were actually soft untracked snow. Bootleg was also good but packed with dead fall and stumps and in need of very careful navigation.

Last run of course was Skydive where as we had guessed the wind had lost it's strength coming over the trees and dropped quite a lot of fresh snow into the run particularly in the top. Things tended to get more twiggy the lower you went but the new snow helped.

Driving away from the hill temps were -10 and rising but the snow such as it was still was coming down very light and very dry, so much so I didn't even need to clear my hot tub cover before use tonight. We are promised some much needed more substantial precip both by way of amount and moisture content over the next 48 hours but for the moment the jury is very much out on this in my opinion.

No comments:

Post a Comment