Day 1 Happy Opening Day

Yes. today was the day we have all been waiting for all summer an what we had was an opening day way better than anything we could have expected. In fact whilst it wasn't "vintage" it was still pretty good which when you compare Fernie standards to the rest of the world means that it was probably awesome by their standards.

Lets have a look at the hard facts. We had another 10 cms of fresh snow overnight which pushed the base to about 90 cms. Now you have to understand that this is a measurement from a snow plot high up on the hill along side Bear where no one skis. It does not bear much relationship to the snow that you will actually find under your skis which will be way less. It is a kind of cypher for how much snow we have and if I say that Lynda always says that she doesn't relax until the base hits 2 metres you might get a feel of exactly what 90 cms means.

It was overcast with flurries all day and the base temps sat in at around +2 with the up the mountain temps probably staying just below zero for most of the day. Later temps started to fall and we seem to be heading for some fairly consistent sub zero temps which is a bit more like the sort of thing we see and will allow the hill to make some new snow low down on the ski outs.

We only got the Old Side today and that was from the Blueberry sign line on one side to the Dancer/Easter sign line on the other. To restrict things further Boom Ridge and Boom Bowl were closed due to conditions although this closure was (as the bard said) honoured more in the breach than the observance.

We skied all day from fence to fence an had great skiing. There was minimal grooming so we had deep untracked snow over most of the hill which stayed good all the way down to the base. particularly good skiing in the morning was Cedar Bowl (all over) Cedar Ridge (all lines) and Kangaroo - about 5 times and the Roo was as good as it gets. The snow was knee deep with many untracked lines and a not enough people (about 2200 on the hill) to trash it. In most places today would be described as a full on powder day with knee deep snow and very few tracks.

In the afternoon we hit across to Easter/Dancer and hit the sign line which had soft tracked up snow. After that we got to looping Linda's (awesome deep untracked powder) Boomerang (see Linda's) and all parts in between. By the end of the day with our legs hurting from all the deep powder we finished in the Bear chutes which like so much we had skied was deep untracked powder but with dead fall adding to the many early season hazards that we just had to air it over to get down.

Great beers in the Griz with buddies to celebrate opening day. We are told that the plan for the coming week is for a rolling opening of the hill which with any luck will mean new deep untracked powder becoming available on a daily basis and with no one around from Monday onwards to enjoy it - here's hoping.