Friday, December 23, 2016

Day 22 Yet More Snow

Yes, I know it's hard to believe but we are in the middle of yet another snow cycle making this possibly the best pre Christmas skiing anyone can remember for a long while. I will try and put things in some perspective.

Overnight there was no new snow so the base stayed at about 150 cms. Pretty well on time it started to snow at around 9 o'clock and has been snowing ever since. At first the snow was quite light but picked up in the afternoon so that by close of play I guess we had about 10 cms of fresh. The best news is that we should get at least another 10 over night and up to 18 tomorrow. I was told that the snow started falling more heavily on the Old Side early in the day but as I had a New Side day I only have second hand accounts of that.

Temps on the way to the hill and again while driving back were -5 in the valley and about a degree or two cooler up the hill giving almost perfect powder snow. Light was a bit flat in the snowy conditions but there was no wind although the low cloud meant that there was no chance that we would get Polar Peak today.

We started about 1 hour late due to way too much over indulgence last night at our "Christmas" dinner, once again thanks to Dan and Ruth. The snow was already starting to build on the New Side and although there was only a few cms on top of the tracked powder of the last few days it made a huge difference. The whole hill was refreshed and there was no evidence of yesterdays crust so it actually felt like we had way more fresh snow and seemed quite deep in places, in other words a full on powder day which just got better as the snow accumulated during the day.

We spent the rest of the day through to last bell trying out lots of different permutations of the Currie Chutes and the Big 3. The Reverse Traverse was in about the best shape I have ever seen it and the bridge is so mellow getting out there it is a bit of a non event. Particularly memorable deep powder was in Decline (left side was deep) Stag Leap (twiggy in the last pitch) Window Chutes (3 times it was so good) The Brain (just the top section which was super deep) Concussion/Toms/Currie Chutes (all excellent and mostly untracked) Touque Chutes (really deep with a mellow exit into Easter) etc.

Run of the day for me was Lone Fir which was well worth the hike up and so deep and mellow that I was actually looking to find a more difficult line to make it more testing - something I have never done before. I also ran across to Spinal Tap which is filled in down in the creek but only just, very  interesting. I actually tried Lazy Locals and Mitchy's for the first time this season and they were very good but a little sketchy in the chokes. Currie Bowl was closed early for avi control work so the usual last run down Skydive had to be missed but a run off through the top section of Triple Trees which was mostly untracked was not a bad second prize.

So a very good day with better to come tomorrow and maybe even better still the next (Christmas) day. It will be hard to trash all of this before the holiday crowds show up but we will give it our best shot.

2 comments:

  1. How is your calf? Healing well? Good to hear it's not slowing you down on the hill 😃👍⛷⛷

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  2. Thanks, repairing well. Still can't quite run but when locked in a ski boot it is no problem and doesn't seem to affect the skiing. It's been all the colours of the rainbow but now is even starting to look normal again

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