Day 40 Leftovers

Just like with food, when you have feast there are always leftovers. Whether these are any good or not can be very variable and can range of unappetizing cold cuts to a delicious meal. Skiing is a bit like that so when we have a great day like yesterday and no more snow we get leftovers which may or may not be any good, today the leftovers were very good and in some places almost as good as the original feast.

We had a dusting of snow overnight nothing to get excited about. Temps that had been rising dropped back and on the way to the hill we had -12. During the day things didn't get much warmer as it was -14 as we drove away but during the day there was bit of a warm up and an inversion so that at the Polar Peak load we were seeing -10 by early afternoon. The weather started overcast with some minor flurries but during the day the cloud broke up to give sunny periods although we were back to overcast with some non accumulating flurries by the end of the day.

Despite what I said about the Old Side yesterday (and got some stick from die hard Old Side fans for my trouble) I decided to give it a try as I had skied pretty well everywhere I wanted to go on the New Side and Polar Peak was only on standby. We went out on the Cedar High Traverse which was reasonably slick and easy to use and hit Snake Ridge which was ok but a little tracked up and chunky. Our return was through Kangaroo (ok and soft) and Boomerang (soft bumps) so although loops did take a long time the two drops involved were good skiing.

After that we just kept looping out to Gorby bowl which was super deep with many untracked lines and each time round we dropped that little bit lower to get more deep untracked snow. This involved traversing out into Steep and Deep which we managed each time although it was bit bushy at times and of course the exit through Steep and Deep (right chute) was very good indeed. Returns were always the same as before and after three loops that completed a great morning of skiing deep soft snow.

After lunch we headed to the New Side and found that Polar Peak had opened but had not been skied much. Papa Bear was soft and deep as was Mamma Bear and Crusty the Clown chute although all had a lot of variations in the skiing surface and you had to stay on your game at all times. The one big mistake was trying Grand Papa Bear which was ok in the chute but below was wind swept ice, crud, wind slab and a whole other selection of ugly surfaces - we only tried it once.

The afternoon comprised of a few loops of Polar as described above and then a drop to base and then repeat. The drops were through Decline which skied really well all the way down with lots of soft snow, Touque Chutes (still ok) and Spinal Tap which was rather more skied out than I anticipated.

Last run of course was Skydive which was the usual rip and if anything the snow was holding up even better than yesterday although obviously rather more tracked up. A few non alcoholic drinks in the bar and home for an early night to see if I can shake this cold that has been draining my energy for the past few days. Looks like we have few days of cold dry conditions before the next precip cycle starts at the weekend.