Craig's Report - February 12, 1997 - 2:00 PM

Snow nice to see you

The morning arrived with ankle deep powder in the driveway, breaking a two week snow drought. Up on the hill the snow was light and in places deep enough for the occasional face shot. This fellow on Boom seemed to be enjoying it. <g>

Unfortunately it was not deep enough to prevent the lumps and bumps of the previous crunchies from being felt underneath, thus depriving us of that bottomless feeling we all crave. Especially farther down the mountain you had to be cautious of what was lurking underneath the great looking new stuff. For instance this lovely looking opening on lower Cedar Ridge was not all that pleasant a ski due to the underlying crunchies and even a little breaking rain crust under the new snow.

Don't get me wrong though, this was a vast improvement over the earlier stuff and excellent skiing was available on the mountain. In particular the upper parts of Cedar Ridge had some lovely turns even if you could feel the bottom underneath. Cedar Bowl was closed above the Boom cat track and Lizard was closed to the skiers right of Arrow above the Tower 6 road, but this still left quite a bit of terrain available and freshies were not hard to find.

There was a significant wind blowing across the ridges, with Sunnyside being windward and Cedar Ridge etc. being on the lee side. So while the top of Cedar Ridge was great, Sunnyside was, well, interesting. The wind had scoured the tops of the moguls while dropping snow in the troughs to present a nice mixture of hard ice and over the knees snow. Mix in enough blowing snow so you couldn't tell which was which and you have the makings of a challenge. <g> Strangely enough I found Lizard itself, which often suffers when it is windy, was reasonably nice. On the way out I took my first run of the season down through the alders to the skiers right of China wall and found it most agreeable. The new snow wasn't all that deep there, but the underlying crust was smooth so nice silky turns were possible.

It is still snowing, but the possible fly in this revival ointment is that the temperature is now hovering near 0C at the house. The snow still seems quite light, but it makes me nervous nonetheless.