Day 24 Merry Christmas

Yes, we are having a very merry Christmas and I hope so is everyone else. In keeping with our Christmas tradition we celebrate Christmas in the UK fashion with Christmas dinner at lunch time and not in the evening. This means that we only ski the morning on Christmas Day and then it's more of a tour round the hill than the usual full on trashing of the hill that takes place daily. That having been said we had a pretty full on session today and didn't get off the hill until gone 2 so it looks like "dinner" will be near 4 or 5 o'clock allowing for some serious soaking and drinking in the hot tub.

The promised snow didn't really materialise overnight and we started today with only 7 cms of fresh in the last 12 hours and the base was only just over 160 cms. What did happen was that an arctic high pushed in so temps dropped to a starting figure of -18 and we had another bluebird day, cold but with not a cloud in the sky. The effect on the snow was to dry it out and give good tracked and packed powder all over the upper mountain.

We went to the Old Side and toured around Boom, Boom Ridge, Cedar Ridge, Bear and of course Kangaroo. Everywhere was soft tracked snow although there were some scrapped down high traffic areas. After a while we went to the New Side.

On the New Side we looped White Pass a few times as the snow had not been trashed yesterday in the poor light and although the conditions were a bit brisk (around -20) the skiing was good in a fair amount of untracked snow. Then they opened Polar Peak and things got really good. The conditions up the Peak were a little patchy moving from really deep soft snow to hard ice/snow pack to avi debris and back again in all runs. The view from the top was of course fantastic and in the great viz the mixed conditions did not really present much of a problem.

Early afternoon we had a great drop down Baby Bear in very deep soft snow and then came off the hill with a real ripper down Skydive. We had a couple of drinks with friends and are now just getting ready for our hot tub before Christmas "dinner" which is now looking more an more like a 5 o'clock event.

The outlook is for remaining cold before moving into yet another snow event Monday night going into Tuesday and then another Pacific system moving in later in the week. The crowds will start to turn up tomorrow and be with us for a week but if we just hunker down and wait then by next week things will be back to normal.