Everything was open today - all the lifts and all the runs. This meant I had a chance to do a little more exploring in Currie as long as I was willing to sign on for the Timber Chair lottery. I took the plunge and my luck held as the temperamental beast obligingly whooshed me up nonstop.
Riding the White Pass Chair, I couldn't help again thinking that Timber really
wasn't the intermediate paradise that had been hoped for. The two main runs,
Heartland and Puff, may not be serious black diamond material, but I suspect
they present a significant challenge to lots of folks arriving from hills where
the blue runs are a little less, shall we say, inclined.
This was reinforced later in the day when I spoke with a couple of folks with a group from London Ontario and they mentioned that they didn't find the new terrain very appealing. It turned out they were partial to slopes like Elk and Dipsy and there really isn't anything like that on the new side. Even oh so flat Falling Star has a tricky little cat walk part way down and the bottom is so flat that folks who don't want to carry lots of speed and don't have good gliding skills get the silk trail upper body workout poling out..
On the other end of the spectrum though, Currie definitely has some terrain
of interest for those extreme skier wannabes among us. I may be getting old
and wussy (okay more wussy), but some of these slopes seemed determined to sell
me off to old man gravity as a disposable plaything.
Butt tightening pitches, combined with lots of trees and the odd cliff band, not to mention snow that varied from fluffy to icy to chunky and to just not interested in staying up there anymore certainly keeps the dulls away.
I took a traverse around the North side of the bowl and sure enough you can easily reach the saddles. They are now routes into Lizard, although with pitches that might give a gecko vertigo. The upper one is very narrow at the top, but the lower one looks fairly manageable, albeit steep.
Since this is supposed to be some sort of ski report, I guess I should at least mention the snow. It was generally great in a well worked over way. Even in Currie there weren't many fresh spots when I headed out this afternoon, but almost everything was soft and carvable with lots of chopped powder and powdery moguls. I found similar conditions in my one run in Cedar Bowl. Moguls were generally very nice and soft, although the odd scrape could be heard. One exception was Gilmar Trail, the cat track like run out off the bottom of Currie, which had significant hard patches which were easily navigable by advanced skiers, but might not have been too pleasant for beginners on this green run.
The hill is now too big to do much more than sample in the couple of hours
I head out for on a typical day. Today I did a couple of runs in Currie and
one in Cedar and that was it. Granted I was dawdling around and exploring in
Currie, but it still represented a respectable 11,000+ vertical feet. Sigh,
so much snow, so little time (and legs).
At 5:15 PM it is -6C at the house under a partially cloudy sky.
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