Day 18 Awesome, awesome, awesome

Yes, today pulled three awesomes on my personal scale which considering it only goes up to 3 is pretty good. Not sure what I will do tomorrow if the forecasts prove correct but more of that later.

Overnight the hill reported 26 cms of fresh snow which was way more than we got in town but when we got there this seemed fairly accurate. On the way to the hill the temps were -7 and all day up the hill we saw figures of around -8/9. Even driving away tonight things had only warmed to -5 which suggests that the forecast that we have been getting are more or less on track. The best thing about today was that it puked snow all day on the hill and with strong winds blowing the sift around we had deep untracked snow all day out of this cycle which must have delivered about half a meter of snow by the time it finished this evening.

The drive to the hill was interesting with number of vehicles finding that all weather or snow and mud tires are no substitute for full winter tires when it come to getting up an unploughed Ski Hill Road. It was a bit of a gong show but in the truck in 4x4 with full winter tires we snaked through with no problem and left the other guys to sort themselves out.

We made an early start and headed to the New Side to avoid me the distress of seeing the snow having been tracked out on the Old Side by various pay for powder groups. My thoughts on this practice are well known and largely unprintable so lets just leave it and not spoil an otherwise awesome day. Timber opened about 15 mins late to allow for avi control but the good news was that after very few of us had loaded they stopped loading for technical reasons. This meant those of us lucky enough to get up had White Pass to ourselves for a couple of loops until the Timber problems were sorted.

The conditions were just awesome with the new snow having rather more moisture content that the last snow cycle so it really was easy to ski very deep hero snow. Viz was a bit tough in the windblown snow but as long as you held up for the worst gusts to pass there was great skiing. It was just  the White Pass core but there were not that many people for a powder day so there were plenty of untracked lines for all.

During the day we had rolling openings to extend the area in Knot Chutes (Tight Knot remains a bit twiggy and rocky and was the only disappointment of the day) Surprise Trees (awesome) Anaconda (many ways down and all out the other side of awesome) Bootleg Glades (very deep but watch for hazards) Big Bang/Lift Line (super deep and untracked but care needed re tree stumps) and even an ungroomed Gilmar Trail might have been considered run of the day in any other circumstances.

I didn't get to the Old Side but I hear good reports in most of the places you would expect. Late afternoon I tried an experimental run down Triple Trees and found the top super deep, the drop on to the cat track tricky with rocks exposed, the second section good and third section in need of a bit more snow due to a load of deadfall - skiable but be very careful. Final run through Anaconda and Bootleg gave us deep untracked lines in places we had been skiing all day, it was that kind of a day.

The best news is that everyone is telling me that this is not the main part of the storm cycle and the main part will hit us tomorrow. If that is the case we might just be in for one of the best day's skiing ever. Even if not as Currie Bowl and Polar didn't open today there is plenty more deep untracked snow to come even if we don't get any more precip out of this cycle. An early night is called for.