It was absolutely pouring at the house yesterday and while we could see that the trees were white not too far up, it just seemed like skiing would be a miserable experience. I later heard reports confirming and contradicting this, but I didn't feel bad about missing the day. However this morning the temperature was hovering around the freezing mark and there was a couple of centimetres of new snow down at the house.
Despite
a late start and lots of people on the slopes, we still found some pretty nice
skiing up there. There was ankle to boot deep snow that I would classify
as powder on the Cedar Ridge runs like this one. The snow did get heavy
farther down, but most of the ridge was great and even the sticky stuff wasn't
bad.
The real draw back was the crowds. It seems the popularity of Fernie has a lot
more to do with how bad Banff is than how good it is here. We never did get up the
Bear T-Bar due to the daunting crowds. It was bad at the Boom chair in the morning
as well, but was fairly light there after noon.
I
was skiing with Davin, my 10 year old son, so pictures including him are obligatory.
This one on Cedar Ridge where he only appears as a dot probably won't
do, so ...
I
have this one of him practicing his steep alder turns in the Bear Chutes.
These were also very pleasant as was just about everything up top. Wallaby
had a fair amount of boiler plate, but I seem to recall Lower North Ridge being
not bad. Davin questioned my sanity when I suggested Kangaroo, so we skipped
it which was probably just as well.
At 5:15 PM it is about -1C at the house and it is snowing lightly. At various times this afternoon it did snow fairly hard in graupel (sp?) form, so perhaps more will materialize overnight.
| Get this report by EMail | Past Reports | Unofficial FAR page |
| Elk Valley Forecast | Official Ski Report | Official FAR Page |