More sun. Lots of soft snow. Life could be worse. <g> Granted we are not talking powder here, but an email message I got made me realize that I do tend to emphasis the negatives in my reports. For instance:
The North facing tree chutes still have their ice closure signs although it seemed to me that the shady areas were a little softer today.
In contrast anything facing South that doesn't get much traffic, such as these glades in Siberia bowl, are a bit like skiing in LePage's best.
Now all of that is true, but it does gloss over the fact that there was some
very fine skiing out there. It is spring and you do have to pick your places
and timing according to your tastes. For instance my neighbor prefers the firmer
early conditions for the fine cruising and sure carving on the groomed runs,
while I don't mind thrashing around out in the sun slop and less frequented
areas. Neither of us is likely to turn our noses up at a nice corn run though.
In fact most of the compacted and well traveled routes had pretty decent skiing
through much of the day and at any given time there were probably spots with
skiing about as good as it gets without powder.
Of course none of this says anything about what tomorrow will bring. Cool and cloudy would be pretty ugly, but a good dump is certainly also possible. The bottom line these reports are only about what I see and essentially useless as forecasts.
Before Timber opened up, I suggested to many folks that a feature of it would be that relative beginners would be able to take the chair to the highest spot on the mountain. Well it is true there is quite an easy run down from the top of White Pass, but I did not realize that it would be very difficult to get those less experienced skiers to the bottom of the lift from the Timber lift. This unfortunately is the easiest way down. Not tough for experienced skiers, but a real obstacle for many. Hopefully the ski hill folks will look into some sort of modifications this summer which will make White Pass more accessible next year.
Note how fast the rock sides are emerging from the snow in Knot Chutes. Don't take this to mean that we are in any danger of quickly running out of snow though. There is the odd brown spot down low, but even around the base things are still fine. Up top there is still a tremendous amount of snow.
At 4:15 P.M. the porch thermometer is claiming 17 C on the sunny side of the house. It is generally clear with just the odd puffy cloud.
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