Day 104 quite a good day

Before we start I have a message for whoever it was ran into my truck in parking lot 2 yesterday and put a dent into the rear corner on the driver's side. The business card or note that you left under my windshield giving me your details must have blown away as there was nothing there when I got back to the truck and obviously you must have left something as only an asshole would hit an unattended truck and just drive off. Please let me have your details asap.

They were not claiming any new snow overnight but on the way to the hill it was -2 and snowing. The effect of the overnight freeze was to put everything back to rock hard boiler plate just like the previous two days. It was overcast all day so we didn't get any softening from the direct sunlight but the freeze line did creep a little way up the hill during the day so we got some softening from atmospheric warming but this was only a the very lowest areas of the hill. All day we had some light flurry activity off and on which gave a cm or two of accumulation on top of the couple of cms we got first thing. The new snow gave us dust on crust for all of the upper mountain which remained frozen rock solid all day.

I headed to the New Side in the hope that the Reverse Traverse would be open which it wasn't. I dropped Currie Powder which was groomed smooth with a thin covering of fresh snow and ran to base via Gilmar Trail in order to try my luck on the Old Side - it wasn't a bad run. Just like yesterday I looped Lizard Bowl on all the runs (Arrow, Bow, Cascade and Dancer) and where possible skied the ungroomed patches in between. It was a bit better than yesterday on the grounds that the new snow did give just  a little bit of fluff to ski on but for the most part it was hard refrozen rain crud.

Late morning I figured that there was no sign line along side Easter Bowl even though it showed on the board as closed and so I traversed in as high as I could. I had four great loops in Easter on a surface that had been beaten flat by the rain and then not subject to skier traffic and finally lightly covered by light snow dust - a winning formula. Just once I traversed all the way out to Spinal Tap which was a bit of an icy experience with some refrozen debris in the lower section. Just before lunch I ran out into Cedar Bowl and found Cruiser to be pretty mellow as was Cedar Centre. Against my better judgement I tried Kangaroo which was marginally less ugly than yesterday but was still hard icy bumps.

After a late lunch I took a New Side loop and found that everything was still closed so just like the morning I ran down a dust covered Currie Powder and Gilmar Trail which were ok. On the Old Side I took over where I left off in the morning and had a couple of loops of Easter which were just as they were in the morning. My exit was, as it had been all morning, through Freeway which was slick, icy and ungroomed. We just had time for a couple of Cedar loops through Cruiser and Cedar Centre which were both skiing even more mellow than this morning and Kangaroo which wasn't.

I had considered trying a side step up to Skydive from Easter for a final run but quite honestly I am prepared to wait until the Big Three open from the top as I don't expect any of them to be that good. We went to the Griz where the usual Tuesday party was well under way and had a great time. It was snowing as we left the hill with the temp at +1 despite all the weather channels saying things in the valley were much warmer. My guess is that we will have a couple of cms more snow tonight and tomorrow will be much like today but I could be wrong.