Craig's Report - January 15, 1998

Warm but still pretty nice

It continued snowing yesterday evening, but around nine o'clock we noticed big chunks of snow falling off of our trees and our backyard started to look like a  cratered lunar landscape in white.  This usually means warmer temperatures and even that dreaded condition involving liquid precipitation.  Sure enough the thermometer was approaching zero C, but what did fall continued to be snow.  This morning there was ankle deep heavy snow in the driveway and it continued to snow, but with the temperature right at the freezing mark one couldn't help conjuring up images of acres of fresh ski snarfing elephant snot.  I went anyway for a couple of quick runs.

In fact the snow was quite nice in a hefty kind of way.  It was quite dense, but remained granular and not the sticky mess that I feared.  Once one got in the groove with it, there was nice carving to be had everywhere. There were very few folks here and the snow was falling heavily, so there was no problem finding fresh stuff to ski. All in all a very nice day.

All of Lizard was now open, but Easter was closed as was the Face Lift, upper Cedar and Snake.

The pictures in these reports have started to all look alike, but gray snowy days are not ideal for scenery.  The pictures do seem to still be popular though, so here is a shot of Cedar Bowl from Cedar Ridge with Cruiser coming down through the center of the picture.

The increased snow pack, the base is now about 240 cm, has helped the alder situation considerably.  The Bear chutes are now generally skiable, although significant route planning can be needed.  This picture was taken looking down the steep center section of  Sunnyside shows that there is still a fair amount of shubbery there, but the more common routes of to the sides and the main lower part are pretty much clear. 

When I got home after a couple of hours of skiing, the snow in the driveway had increased to almost the top of my Sorels and it continues to snow pretty hard.  My cheap hardware store thermometer is steady at minus 1 C as of noon.  The forecast definitely missed on the temperature for today, but it got the snow right and it forecasts a high tomorrow of -5C with periods of snow.