Craig's Report - December 27, 1997


Griz is back

It started snowing fairly hard yesterday evening and boot high powder greeted me in my driveway this morning.   The hill was reporting 17 cm new and there was boot high to knee deep powder everywhere.  There was even some sun in places; in this case over on Snake, while I contemplated a shady but tasty run down Cedar Ridge.

The snow was light and fluffy and while you could still feel hard stuff underneath on more trafficked runs, places like Cedar Ridge were very nice indeed.  Unfortunately the combination of it being December 27th, a Saturday and a dump day meant lots of people.   Not only did things get tracked out quickly, but places like lower North Ridge rapidly degraded into lumps of powder separated by hard skid pans.

Prior commitments meant I only had time for a few quick runs, but I was lucky to run into a couple of free heeling friends from Calgary on Cedar Ridge.  We decided to give Linda's run a try despite the "Not Recommended" sign at the top.  This was probably good advice given that there were probably all kinds of pointy things lying in wait in the snow, but if you managed to miss those there was an excellent run to be had.  Here Roger grins his way through some soft stuff ...

and a little later Brian does his tele thing in the powder and twigs of Sunnyside, which obligingly lived up to its name.

On my way out I took a shot down China Wall which was temporarily in great shape, but I did notice the odd rock still showing down on the flat part of Dipsy.  Surprisingly this did not appear to have been groomed.

As I left there were still streams of people pouring up the road, so I suspect the new snow got well worked over this afternoon.  However there is more snow in the forecast for tomorrow  At 4:00 PM it is -3 C and partially cloudy.

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